I've got a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. In addition to the regular keys, it's also got keys for Web/Home, Search, Mail, Favorites (5), Calculator, and Media functions (Mute, Volume Up/Down, and Play/Pause). Everything works most of the time, and the exception is rather odd.

I use a programming system called Clarion. When that has focus, the Media keys don't work. (All the others still do.) I've also discovered that programs that I create using Clarion also block the media keys (only when they have focus). This indicates that it's probably something in Clarion's Run-Time Library (RTL) that's causing the trouble. The keys will work if I click on a non-Clarion window before hitting the media key, but that's an undesirable hassle.

The odd thing is that I have many colleagues with the same keyboard, and they have no problem.

When I recently upgraded from Vista Professional to Win7 Ultimate, I noticed that various things "appear" differently. For example, with my old system, when I changed the volume or muted the volume bar visualization always appeared at the bottom right on the screen. Now it doesn't appear in certain programs, even when it works. This indicates an order of precedence for visual elements.

I'm fairly certain a similar order of precedence exists for keyboard hooks. Depending on how the hooks are defined, and the order in which they're applied, it would seem that sometimes the IntelliType drivers don't see the media keystrokes.

The Media keys probably behave differently than the rest of the "special" keys, because they are more of a standard across all keyboards, so perhaps are handled by a different driver hooking mechanism.

Does anyone have any suggestions of how I might fix this problem? Is there some way to change the order of hooks? Delay the loading of the IntelliType driver? Thanks in advance!