An oil pressure light story - and warning
 

I am posting this story with the hope that it will help out a fellow rider. I know I had a guardian angel watching over me.
Early this past summer, my pressure light would occasionally stay on longer than normal once I started the bike but it would always go out by the time I hit the end of my driveway (50 feet). Eventually it would not go out on its' own, but if I turned off the motor and restarted it, the light would go out. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes it would not happen for several weeks. Sometimes twice a day. Motor sounded fine. No knocking. Nothing out of the ordinary. I really believed I had a bad sensor but things were busy and I just never got around to checking it. Then for about a month it did not happen again.
Fast forward to vacation and we are 1,600 miles from home. The problem starts up again. But again I am able to make it go away by shutting off and restarting the motor. This happens four or five times while we are returning form Maine but then it does not return. Once we are back home I do not ride the bike for about a week. The first time I start it up after that, the pressure light comes on and this time I can not get it to go out.
Pushing it back in to the garage, I finally break down and check the oil pressure at the sending unit. Well it is not the sending unit. There is absolutely no oil pressure. Fearing the worst I crack open the side believing it to be my cam chain tensioners (34,000 miles on the bike). They look almost new. Very little scoring. Everything inside still looks good. Well now I am in over my head and I get one of my friends involved. He pulls out the cam bearing plate (I hope I am saying this right), checks the oil pump, scratches his head and finally finds a check valve in the plate that is stuck closed. He believes that this check valve was intermittently sticking and that when I would stop the motor the valve would open back up and it finally stuck in the closed position for good. While the tank was off and the motor was somewhat open, we rented a scope and checked out everything else we could looking for damage. We installed the SE tensioner upgrade kit while it was open. Buttoned everything up and 2,000 miles later it is still running strong.
So... I was unbelievably lucky and I am just passing this experience on to others in hopes that it will prevent someone else from making the same bad assumption that I made. As a bonus you won't have to listen to your buddy ride your as* about it either :o