I'm on Lion and I like to use the multimedia Next Track, Play/Pause, and Previous Track keys to control iTunes.
Every once in a while, these keys basically stop working. Sometimes they just don't work and sometimes the action is delayed by minutes. I'll hit the key out of habit and then nothing will happen, so I'll go into iTunes and pause. Then maybe 5 minutes later, it will unpause (presumably because the key event finally made it to iTunes.)
Any idea what in the world is going on? The only thing that seems to fix it is a reboot (though a log out and log in might do it as well. Not in a position to try that at the moment.)
Argh! It just happened again. Super annoying.
Best Answer
I finally just figured it out! It turns out that I had a Quicktime process that was stopped (I had done an open on an avi file on the command line.) A kill -CONT on the pid allowed it to continue so I could close it and now I have my keys back!