Please someone reply to fix this. I am having exact same problem with my 6400 and it just started today. Needless to say it is extremely annoying and causes me lots of grief

The same problem occurs on my Inspiron 9400. I have reinstalled the Audio driver, Quickset and most other possible updates/fixes. The computer still locks up when i push the audio buttons. Does anyone have a solution yet?

I own an M1710 and just had the same problem. I did a reformat a few months ago. I turned on my computer this morning and the problem just happened. When ever I press one of the front panel media buttons the computer locks up but I can still move the mouse cursor around. I have not installed anything in the past few days and I am confused as well as frustrated as to why the problem spontaneously happened. Through research of the problem I have found myself here and hope there is a solution.

Hi there, This seems to occur on a huge range of dells, I have not found anything on how to fix it, just dead discussions. To add my 2 cents worth. I have a dell m170, working fine for almost 2 years. Suddenly I am having the volume buttons causing freeze, only thing works is ctrl-alt-del then can't select tasks, windows button also works but nothing more, need to do power button reset. Before this occurred I did install a registered copy of Kaspersky antivirus (was using a trial for a month with buttons going fine, so I don't think this is related). Would love a solution. I tried reinstalling quickset to no avail. Disabling or reinstalling virus software no result. From what I read only fix is to reinstall winXP. Any new info from support? I will ring them and if I get a result repost.

**Update**

Installed Microsoft Intellitype (version 6.1) and selected digital media keyboard for my XPS m170.

Now there is no more freezing, buttons work fine again, without having to reinstall from scratch thank god!

Perhaps the dell support should add this to the solutions in their knowledge base, if it wasn't for digialC's post I would be facing a 3 hour ordeal of reinstalling windows.

The solution doesn't seem to be anywhere else on the net, or provided by dell

Interestingly, the MsIntellitype seems to coexist happily with dell quickset (so far!).

mine used to work, but then because of a power failure my laptop suddenly turned off and now the little blue bar that used to show up in the middle of the screen is no longer there. the sound goes up and down still, and the light works fine too. but i am not seeing the blue bar in the white box showing the volume control any more. its a dell 1705 and i have had it for about 2 years. never had a problem like this. windows is xp.