Problem with the Volume Panel plugin

[Matthias Sauppe]

Hey folks,

I'm having a problem with the XFCE Volume panel plugin.

I've been using XFCE a quite long time by now and I recently upgraded
from XFCE 4.0 to 4.4. In the new (4.4) version, the XFCE volume control
panel plugin seems to capture my keyboard multimedia keys. I don't want
that - can I turn this feature off? In XFCE Settings --> Keyboard, I
already removed my multimedia keys shortcuts.

Background to my question:
My soundcard is an Audigy 2 Platinum where the headphone jack can be
turned on/off independently of the external amplifier. So I wrote a C
program that manages (among others) my Mute key. If I pressed the Mute
key, my program cycled through "Speaker", "Headphone" and "Mute"
settings, and I was pretty happy with it. My program gets the
keypresses using the evdev devices and it sets the mixer volume using
the "amixer" command line tool.
However, this program still works - but only if the volume control
plugin wasn't loaded. After loading it, my Mute cycle doesn't work
anymore, because both my program AND the volume control plugin do
actually handle the keypresses. In fact, my program also handles the
volume keys, but this is not that important. The Mute key is more
critical for me.

Does anyone have an idea?

Thanks
Matthias