Hmm, I have probably a work around.
You should delete all the CoH test server folders.
Next, in your main City of Heroes directory make a copy of CoHUpdater.exe and rename that to CoHUpdater.eu.exe. Run the .eu version once to update it to the European version (dont worry, the US version is still working), close it after it is updated.
Update the european version to the test version like it is explained in
How to access the Training room (EU)
If you fire up the normal
CoHUpdater.exe -test shortcut, install it in the same directory of the EU test version it should go quite a bit faster. The updater is still quite slow but should cost around the 5 minutes (a bit better then 100 years

)
Hope it helps the lot of you.