What is windows doing?

When i start Windows 7, the windows functions are busy as in " not responding" Nothing seems out of the ordinary when I go to the task-manager but when i click the start orb, I get the spinning disk. If I persist, I get a white background. If I do a restart, it takes forever.

How can I see what is going on in the background??

When you go into the Task Manager, go to the Processes tab and click on CPU. That should show you if anything is eating up the CPU which may cause the sluggishness. What's at the top of the list when you do that and how much of the CPU is it using?

Something is corrupted. Try sfc /scannow in elvated cmd.

An alternative method or perhaps an additional method is to go to search, and type in process explorer, you will get a lot of valuable information that may help.