What's my pc doing ? Any good solutions ?

It is ok on hibernate but if I reboot or turn back on from 'off' it is taking ages to log on and bring up the home page etc. Also it is running very slow at times and most of all, when I click the red cross top left to close off I get the screen saver page coming down in curtain like form, and sometimes parts of windows won't close? If I have an unwanted program running how do I get rid of it? I have gone to 'task manager' and tried to remove some high usage unwanted entries but get a box with a red cross saying I am unable to do this ??? Can anyone help? (( and dont try to send me to some free? not free type adware /spyware cleaning crap)) cos I am not a complete novice and can detect them. I already run Norton and Spybot regularly updating and do regular scans. Any good solutions please ?

What's my pc doing ? Any good solutions ?hijack this

use awc personal Free software. It has one click function to do all sort of scanning and cleaning stuff. Easy to use.

What's my pc doing ? Any good solutions ?liveupdate

Have you tried Windows Defender from Microsoft it not only removes spy-ware etc it can also check what programmes are running, tell you what they do , and disable them. It has an option to go to a website (spy net) to get further info. Also you do not mention how much ram you have got, my daughters machine has 256 meg and was quite fast when purchased but as she added more software it slowed right down. We doubled the ram to 512 and saw an immediate improvement. Hope this helps
Turn off automatic updates. This service has a mind of it's own hogging everything anytime it wants to. IT starts by itself even if it's not scheduled to. It makes your computer (at least mine) crawl to almost not moving. Just remember to turn it on once it a while to get your updates.
Rather than using Task Manager try using Process Explorer. I have been using Process Explorer for many years now because I got fed up with the limitations of Task Manager. As for the speed problem only thing I can suggest is defragmenting your drive but you've probably already done that.