Hitting Play or Record, blue stop button lights up... delay

[The Weed]

Time to start. And you're not backing up your programs, you're backing up your entire system. You could image your system drive, remove it, put in a properly formatted empty hard drive in it's place and then bring back that image using the rescue cd (it steps into DOS) and be ready to go with a new hard drive as your system drive.

Use Acronis True Image Home or Norton Ghost. I use Acronis and image my system drives every night and before any update or upgrade. If anything goes wrong, I bring the image back. The only thing I've lost is any data since the last image. With updates or upgrades, there's no loss. I also image my record drive every night too. The images are on separate hard drives, they're too cheap now not to get extras.

Some have cloned hard drives they can swap in and out of their computers if something goes south. I have 7.3.1cs7 and now 8.0.1 on my Pro Tools computer and switch between the two by restoring images, keeping those images current over time. I could dual boot, but I find using images easier in my case. YMMV

In your case, in the middle of sessions, the best case scenario is to hold off updating until your sessions are completed. But, since you're having issues that 8.0.1 will probably solve, I would make an image of my system drive, then update to 8.0.1 and reboot. Then trash preferences and Digidesign databases and reboot. Then open Pro Tools, rebuild my Preferences and take 8.0.1 for a spin and try to stress it as much as possible. If it's all good, back to your sessions. If it's not all good and your previous 8.0 was better, the Play/Pause Issue notwithstanding, just restore the image you made just before updating to 8.0.1 and you'll time travel back to when 8.0.1 wasn't on your computer. Total time, for imaging, stress testing and restoring if needed, probably 2 to 2.5 hours.

Cheers,