Why does Visual Studio disable the media buttons?

I've got iTunes running and the media buttons on my computer work with it. I've installed mmkeys.dll which has been recommended for making iTunes work with media keys in the background and it works fine with all apps - firefox, thunderbird, MSN messenger, Open Office.

But when Visual Studio 2008 is i开发者_运维知识库n the foreground the buttons stop working. Can't hit pause when the phone rings.

Any ideas?

This is probably due to Visual Studio running as an Administrator, and whatever software controls your keyboard media buttons OR the media player itself does not run as admin.

As I was answering this question I decided to try opening iTunes as an administrator, and that solved the problem for me.

To make a program always open in admin mode:

1. Right click the program and select 'Properties'.
2. Select the 'Compatibility' tab.
3. Under 'Privilege Level' at the bottom, check check box 'Run this program as an Administrator'.

After you run & close the program for the first time with these settings, make you you tell it that the program worked correctly so that it will keep these settings.

Are you sure that those keys arn't mapped to some action in Visual Studio? A lot of the "media buttons" that I have seen really do key combos so Play might be Ctrl + Alt + P (I don't know any specific key values I'm just recalling the generic pattern I remember). You should be able to check this by going into Visual Studio -> Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Keyboard. Select the "Press Shortcut Keys" text box then hit one of your media buttons. You will see a command become visible in the drop down below this text box showing what command it mapped to that combination.