> Weren't all transactions made on the v0.8 blockchain eventually rendered null and void?
No they were not null and void, there's no lasting records of what happened but they would have either existed on both chains (likely), or been returned to the memory pools of miners when they were reorganized out (likely). There was only one recorded instance of double spend during the event which was intentional, it and any descendant transactions would have been invalidated on the chain that did not win.
> Please explain why all of the above does not count as the network being "shut down" in any sense of the word.
Well "shut down" implies that nothing was operational, the network was perfectly functional it just happened to have fragmented due to an oversight in the way the underlying database in 0.7 was configured (you could non deterministically run out of locks, 0.8 didn't have the same failure but wasn't wide spread at the time). It might not have been safe to rely on untrusted transactions from outside sources during the event but anybody not doing this had zero risk whatsoever. The main losers in this event were the miners who threw away their block reward to speed up the resolution of the fork, which were re compensated at a later time anyway.
> and also that any transactions that you did on the v0.8 block might need to be re-broadcast?
