Another thing you could do is to go to your publish settings and lower the quality of jpegs, mp3s ect... If you want to test how long your files are going to load then go to the control menu, and click test movie.
I don't know if it makes any difference, because .fla is just a flash project file and the .swf file is the published file. Though if it is for uploading the project to any website like flash tutorials or etc. it is good to keep it low on space.