Multimedia Keyboard Hotkey Mystery

[Stealthy]

First of all, let me apologise if this has been covered before - I've searched through the forums and this particular issue doesn't seem to have come up.

This concerns issues that may revolve around my soundcard and/or my keyboard.

I have a Microsoft Wireless Multimedia Keyboard.

Each multimedia key has always worked regardless of the keyboard EXCEPT the volume controls.

At first, everything was fine - you press volume down, the master volume goes down accordingly. Press volume up and it goes up. For some reason one day this stopped working. Annoying at first, but eventually I got over it.

Then one day I noticed I was able to assign the volume keys on my keyboard to the global shortcuts on winamp. I press up, music goes up. Press down, music goes down. Essentially the feature had passed to the wav signal as opposed to the master volume which remained unresponsive.

A few days ago, this feature too disappeared - coinciding with an upgrade to 5.24. Reverting back to 5.21 was no help.

If there's any ideas about what could be causing this issue, it'd be a help.

If it helps, I use XP, Winamp (obviously), my soundcard is a Terratec 6Fire and the keyboard is a standard Microsoft wireless job.

Thanks.