Cocos2d - Actions and Animations are not paused

When I do this:

[gameLayer pauseSchedulerAndActions];

Most of the game pauses, but the sprites that are undergoing this action do not pause spinning:

[sprite runAction:[CCRepeatForever actionWithAction:[CCRotateBy actionWithDuration:5.0 angle: 360]]];

Also, those sprites that are running CCAnimations do not stop animating:

CCAnimation *theAnim = [CCAnimation animationWithSpriteFrames:theFrames delay:0.1];
CCSprite *theOverlay = [CCSprite spriteWithSpriteFrameName:@"whatever.png"];                
self.theAction = [CCRepeatForever actionWithAction:[CCAnimate actionWithAnimation:theAnim]];

How can I get these to pause when the game is paused? I would expect “pauseSchedulerAndActions” to pause actions, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

pauseSchedulerAndActions is not recursive, so it will only affect actions and schedules on the node you are pausing, not it's children.

if your scene/layer is shallow, you could probably just get away with looping through the layer's children and calling (pause/resume)SchedulerAndActions on each, otherwise, if you have a deeper graph, you'll probably want to call it recursively. I wrote up a small test and this worked for me:

-(void) pauseSchedulerAndActions: (BOOL) pause forNodeTree:(id)parentNode shouldIncludeParentNode:(BOOL)includeParent
{
    if(includeParent)
    {
        (pause) ? [parentNode pauseSchedulerAndActions] : [parentNode resumeSchedulerAndActions];
    }

    for( CCNode *cnode in [parentNode children] )
    {
        (pause) ? [cnode pauseSchedulerAndActions] : [cnode resumeSchedulerAndActions];

        if(cnode.children.count > 0)
        {
            [self pauseSchedulerAndActions:pause forNodeTree:cnode shouldIncludeParentNode:NO]; // on recurse, don't process parent again
        }
    }
}

so in your case you could try calling this method and passing in your gameLayer