Sound related hot keys not working

[Cameron Hutchison]

I have a Dell Inspiron 8500 notebook with Ubuntu Dapper. I am having
problems getting the sound related hot keys working. I've got a whole
list of issues - more than seemingly possible for the number of keys :-(

Part of the problem may be that I dont know how the hot keys are
processed so I may be doing something wrong somewhere - but I'm trying
to configure everything through the gnome settings.

This notebook has the following hot keys:
  Vol up (XF86AudioRaiseVolume)
  Vol down (XF86AudioLowerVolume)
  Mute (XF86AudioMute)
  Play/Pause (XF86AudioPlay)
  Stop (XF86AudioStop)
  Next (XF86AudioNext)
  Prev (XF86AudioPrev)

All keys seem to generate the correct X keysyms (as listed above -
discovered with xev and the Keyboar Shortcut preferences window). 

I have selected the keyboard layout for "Laptop/notebook Dell Inspiron
6xxx/8xxx" in the Keyboard preferences window.

I am using rhythmbox to play my music.

Issue #1: Volmue up/down and mute do not work fully. I have a volume
applet on my task bar and have configured it to control both "Master"
and "Headphone". The volume up/down and mute buttons only work on the
"Master" track. Since I use headphones almost exclusively, I'd like to
have the hotkeys at least control the Headphone track, but preferably
both like the volume applet.

Issue #2: Volume up does not work at all. When pressed, the volume
indicator/slider appears on the screen, but the volume does not change.
Volume down and mute do work.

Issue #3: Play/Pause behaviour is really strange. Sometimes when I have
disabled this in Keyboard Shortcuts, it still works - rhythmbox will
play/pause correctly, and I cannot see the event with xev. Other times
when disabled, xev gets the event but reports the keysym as "NoSymbol".

If I try to set the shortcut by selecting it and pressing the button,
the shortcut appears as "0xa2", but xev captures the button event and
reports the keysym as XF86AudioPlay. If I set the short again straight
after, it appears as "XF86AudioPlay", but xev reports it as "NoSymbol".
If I keep repeating this, it cycles through the two cases.

When the key is generating a XF86AudioPlay keysym it is doing nothing
anyway! Rhythmbox ignores it.

Right now, I cannot get it to return to the best working state - where
Play/Pause is disabled in Keyboard Shortcuts, but rhythmbox is still
responding to it.

Issue #4: Stop, Prev and Next do not work consistently in rhythmbox.
Right now they work as expected. Before I fiddled, when the Keyboard
Shortcuts window reported the same state as now, they did not work at
all (pressing them did nothing noticable in rhythmbox).


This is all driving me mad. The volume buttons didnt work in breezy
either, but the other buttons worked correctly.

What is all the magic behind the scenes for these keys? Is there more
config I can experiment with?

Thanks