What the *#&% is \"paused\" playback????!?!!?

I'm getting pretty grumpy after 12 hours of making bad singers sound as if they can ... and as my reward... the moment I think I'm done and I'm ready to listen down to this mix, I get this: Basically, I hit play (or spacebar), and the stop button lights up while the play button flashes, and it says "pause" on the bottom left corner of the edit window. Never seen this before... Not sure what it would be for. . it is definitely NOT online waiting for timecode... anyway... I'm using 6.9.2cs2 on 10.4.2 on a G4/933 with a gig of RAM, and i'm hopped up on caffeine, looking forward to a long night awake with my 3 week old son who likes to stare or cry into the darkness of night and ponder the newness of his life. So... I'm gonna reboot and move on, .. but if someone recognizes what this is, any help would be a big help .. -dave

could it be?

I believe it's called pre-prime. It's a mode that lets you start playback or record instantly, without any latency. IYou initiate it by holding down option and clicking play, then push play again. Or maybe it isn't?

I had this several times when I was leaving my PT rig for 15min an the system got into "sleep" mode my Mbox felt into sleep as well... when I came back I always had this "stopped playback" (exactly as shown on the picture...) I had to restart my system to get it away... maybe its a bug?