My boyfriend has the same problem (game crashing after pressing "Play") since this morning, but everything is working fine for me. That happens to him after almost every patch.
He has had the same problem before and fixed it with system restore, but that is not working anymore.
He has tried installing DirectX 9 again, deleting NVIDIA drivers with driver fusion and trying different drivers, deleting the FFXIV folder under My Games, rebooting several times, running the game as administrator, running another game in the background, even changing the sound format to 44100 Hz and god knows what else.
We have checked every forum discussion about this problem that can be found through google and tried most of the suggested fixes, but had no luck so far.
Hell, how can such a huge game be having stupid problems just like any small crappy private server. What are we even paying for, are we getting money back for the days we lost trying to fix their stupid mistakes?
If anyone has come up with a working solution to this problem, please let us know, we're really losing it here!