Yup, shade lights seems to make most of the problem. Noise may actually be from GI, which samples very bright areas around the light sources.
Several things you could try:
Decrease Max sample intensity - Default is 20... so you could try 10. It will introduce slight bias but could speed things up.
You could set the lights under shades to be disc shape. Make sure they are facing downwards, and try to cover entire circular end of the shade, to minimize light bounced off the shade and maximize direct light contribution. Of course that would look bad if you looked on the lamps from the bottom, as it would look like one big flat surface. But if you do not plan to render the scene from such angle, it should not matter :)
Then, you could try to replace thin ceiling light material with CoronaMTL with diffuse set to 0, and self illumination enabled. After that, place a large, not too strong CoronaLight in rectangular mode right under them, rectangle shape being about the size of all those ceiling lights together, and make it invisible to camera and reflections and refractions :)
And last, if above does not help, you can try using standard 3ds Max lights with inverse square falloff (physically correct light falloff) and CoronaShadows... It's partially a fake, but it should not make much difference. They are not as physically accurate, but they render almost instantly :)