Seems no-one has answered your second question

2) Pre-programmed hotkeys. If I press one of the multimedia keys on my keyboard, it opens Calculator, another opens Notepad, etc... I want to disable that so I can write my own hotkey program.

To disable these extra keys you could go to device manager, uninstall the 'special keyboard' and install the default one.

If you want to take a difficult way, that is changing virtual keys on driver basis, you could search for a thread I once started about scancode map registry key.

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=53329&hl=

A third way would be to download a program, but i guess those tend not to be on driver basis, stay activated all the time, and take up resources to do simple things, which I don't like .

Greets

Davor

Edited September 17, 200520 yr by Davor

Actually, that's the problem. Since I don't have the driver it's installed as a Standard 101-Key Keyboard. Windows just seems to be assuming that all keyboard multimedia keys do the same thing.