[SOLVED!] x41 Fn Keys Not Working & Standby Problem

[irv4]

After a heavy duty ThinkVantage System Update (which might have been a bad idea), and mistreating problems going into standby*, my Fn keys were not operating properly, and no amount of uninstalling and reinstalling of hotkey drivers and other thinkpad software did anything to bring them back. In the course of all this, there were many restarts.

*I tried reinstalling the power management driver to solve the standby issue (which likely did nothing to help), but I finally nailed it (I believe) by disabling the virtual cd drive in Device Manager.

The Fn key solution (for me, anyway): In the course of trying to fix the standby problem (uninstalling and reinstalling drivers, etc), the device "ThinkPad PM Device" got one of those yellow exclamation points in Device Manager. I uninstalled it, scanned for new hardware (it re-added automatically and without a problem) and reinstalled the hotkey drivers. After a restart, all is well.

More on Standby: For more reliable standby function, it also helps to disable the "Direct Parallel" network adapter (I got that from a MS KB article), uninstall Nero if you have it (I don't know about that one, but these virtual drive image mounters seem to cause problems) and to auto-configure IRQs in the BIOS.