Aspire 5632WLMi - Prob with media keys

I bought my acer laptop a month ago, and I've been having problems with the 'media keys' that are located to the right of the keyboard - which include vol-, vol+, play/pause, stop, FF and FB keys.

Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't; what I'm wondering is if there is some kind of a locking mechanism? Did I press buttons or the like to change the settings that disabled them or are they simply broke?

And when those keys don't work, neither do the e (empowering tech), email or webbrowser keys when I press them.

What could be wrong?

Thanks!
/ Sara

 

The multimedia keys may work when you only have focus on Windows Media Player.

The empowering keys, etc rely on Launch Manager. Check to see that it is running.

 

actually they used to work even when I played PC games such as Tomb Raider or watched other vid clips using media player classic.

When the media keys stop working, so do some of the Fn+F# buttons for some reason. For instance, when I used to turn the vol up using the media buttons, it used to show, in green colour, displaying on the screen how much I had turned it up in bars. The same thing went for when I pressd Fn+F7 (which is for enabling/disabling the touchpad); it used to display the text 'touchpad disabled' in green when it was disabled. Now it doesn't display any text at all and I have to check the touchpad to see if it was actually disabled or not.

Is this all a mechanical problem or do I have to reinstall keyboard drivers (how?)?
I really don't know what to do

Thanks,
/ Sara

 

In order for that green text to show up you need Launch Manager running. If it doesn't show then Launch Manager is not running.