Space Bar not responding during editting

Question

Under normal circumstances when editting in the timeline, my reporters use the spacebar to play and pause/stop the timeline. There has been some issues of late where the space bar seems to not be working, and requires two or three pushes before it plays or pauses the video in the timeline. The video being rendered does not affect it one way or the other, and it is not constant. It can happen at any time, and often doesn't affect a reporter, or will affect a reporter non-stop (both occured today). For the record, yes I have checked the keyboard and it is not the problem. The spacebar works fine for normal use, its just PPro that has the problem.
Specs: I have four identical edit bays. Each has a Dual Core 2.5 Ghz Pentium  processor, 3.0 gbs of ram, a single sata drive split into two partitions  (system 30 gb and video 470 gb). I am running up to date PPro 5.0.2,  freshly installed on virgin drives. I have two of the bays with the most up to date 64 bit  manufacturer video and audio drivers, and two bays with Windows 7  automatically installed video and audio drivers. The problem is the same  in all four bays.
Help?

Answer 1

Your problem is that your systems are below minimum requirements, with some serious setup faults.
This is harsh:
1. A single disk is below minimum requirements. You need at least two physical 7200 RPM SATA disks
2. Never partition a disk. It will only increase wear and tear and slow down performance.
3. You likely never tuned your system. Look here: Adobe Forums: Guide for installing and tuning a Vista... This also applies to Win7.
4. Your dual core CPU is absolutely bare minimum for DV material, but anything more will grind to a halt.
5. 3 GB RAM is not enough.
You are in for a serious upgrade of your systems.
First Harm, I do want to say thank you and that I realize you are trying to help. But, budget is a major issue, and the likelyhood of upgrading soon is non-existant. So what can we do to work within the specs I have? I had not done all of the steps in the tune up, but yes most of them I had, specifically I had not installed Ccleaner, and I had not turned off all of the windows add ons as yet - both will be fixed soon. Our editting needs are pretty minimal to be honest, which is part of why its so frustrating that PPro is being so cantankerous. Cut in and out of five or ten clips, add in a voice over track, and once in a great while a cross fade between two clips or fade out audio (using the pen tool), export to mpeg, and we're done. Our longest package is 4 minutes and that's most of a news block (segment between commercials - we have a 30 minutes news show, so you can imagine most are in the 1:30 to 2 minute range).
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Someone is sure to comment on that.  I wanted to jump in first and say that while the idea of using a single partitioned hard drive isn't a good one, doing so is highly unlikely to be the cause of this particular issue.
Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I knew about someone would say something eventually, but given that it works most of the time, and only freezes up occasionally, like you I find it unlikely that this is the issue. I'm not saying it won't contribute to it (I know it can). The sad part of all this is I can't get it to replicate the space bar freeze up for me, and while I experience it when I go into the bays for the reporters, I have no idea what they have done up until that point in order to troubleshoot what they are doing wrong. I can and have run an install at the same time as editting video and not had a single slow down whatsoever, while several reporters have issues running PPro and notepad. One is running her yahoo mail in IE, and I think that is one of the problems she runs into (given how resource hoggy IE can be - especially on yahoo's webmail interface), but that's one person, not all of them.