Editors hang .. how to monitor background tasks?

Often when I open an existing file, for a second I will have good syntax hilighting but then:

a: Most/all of the hilighting goes away
b: the editor cursor goes away.  Meaning that I can't insert or change text.

I'm new to PyCharm, and don't now how to tell what's going on in the background.  With Eclipse/PyDev, if you have a huge codebase and have your git/hg repo under the project directory, pydev would spend so much time scanning changed files that it would bog severely.

questions:

a: how do I tell what PyCharm is doing in the background w.r.t. builders, code inspection, etc.

b: is anyone else having this problem?  I've seen it to some degree on all three systems I've tried it on:

• Oracle JDK 7.something
  
• always displayed in Cygwin/X on win7x64.

So far.. it's maddening.  Either I'm missing some fundamental difference from Eclipse/PyDev code editing, or I've managed to trigger a bug?  If I can't get beyond this, no chance of me buying a license :)