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 in the foreground the buttons stop working. Can't hit pause when the phone rings.
Any ideas?
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.