Screen-switch key on laptop not working anymore.

[passive]

Hi All,

I have a Dell 640M (E1405 in US, I think). fn+F8 is usually the key I use to switch display devices. I've had occassional problems with it, but at some point recently it seems to have stopped working entirely. When I press it, "dmesg" gives me:

atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0x8b on isa0060/serio0).
atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e00b <keycode>' to make it known.

The timing of this is rather unfortunate, as I finally got myself a decent monitor at work, and now I find I have to do quite a bit of manual configuration in order to get it to display properly.
I know I've upgraded to 2.6.21 since I last used this button, but I tried booting off of my old 2.6.20, with no difference in the result.

Is there anything besides the kernel that I could have changed to cause this to occur? Are there any kernel-specific things I should be aware of to enable this functionality?

Any other ideas?

Thanks!

[nick_already_taken]

Does this

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Use_Multimedia_Keys

help?