This exactly mirrors my experience. "Starting" is slow in Windows and just keeps getting slower. That could be booting, logging in, waiting for an application to start, waiting some more for an application to start, and then waiting even more, not being sure if it ever is going to start, waiting some more, and then it starts.
If you are doing a lot of waiting look into getting an SSD for your boot drive.
Or you're running some kind of corporate security product that is going to a remote server for "Mother, may I launch this?" on every EXE and DLL.