I'm running KDE4.2. I have a dell precision M keyboard, and it's set to this in systemsettings. My media keys appear to work with kmix. Though, if I restart KDE, they stop working, until I reset them. Any how to make them work across restarts/reboots.

It is likely that the command that specifies your keyboard layout is not being executed automatically. I believe the setting in System Settings has a "command" box in it, which should contain the needed command. This needs to be added to your login autostart command list.

Err, I was wrong. It isn't working. What I thought was working was lineakd running in the background, but that's not an acceptable solution...

Ok, I finally fixed things. It's 4 AM, so I'm not sure I want to write up a summary of what I did. It was a deeper problem with X/Nvidia. I apologize for blaming The K.