play button missing

Had a similar incident one time about 2 weeks ago. Appeared to be a "refresh" problem. Have noted three different refresh problems -- two of which (missing button 1 time and "Inspector" main view display of movie title 3 times) I could not replicate with any regularity. All three have been reported to Apple. In my case, the button was back the next work session.

Quick questions: "Is the area where the button is supposed to be still "hot?" That is, does clicking the area where the button is supposed to be still start/stop your movies? For that matter, does double-clicking the screen area still play a movie and single-clicking a playing movie still stop it and/or does the space bar still start/stop a movie? I.e., can you determine if the problem is in the refresh, graphic control only, or all forms of control sequencing? Also, have you checked the QT and player versions? I previously had a problem where System was loading an older player from a second internal drive instead of the player that matched my start-up QT structure. (I.e., the two had some compatibility problems.) Are you using QT 7.3 with Tiger or QT 7.2 here?

Okay. then our problems seem to be somewhat different. Here is what mine looked like.

On mine, everything worked normally but the button just wasn't visible. Am wondering if you problem might be more one of a corrupted player. Have you tried re-installing just the "Player" package? In addition, as Baby Boomer mentioned above, it is also a good idea to "Repair Disk Permissions" following any software installation. (Strange things do sometimes happen when you don't.)