Hot keys not working

Hello, I just registered on these forums to ask this one question but now that I've actually found a place to look I may have many more to ask.

I've looked all over for this exact problem but it seems the answer is ungoogleable. Some, that is, all the hot keys I care about aren't working. It's not a broken keyboard, it's not not the FN key switch. I can reinstall OSX again but I.. like.. you know.. don't want to.

Some of the effected hotkeys are for the brightness, the volume, and the power button (for sleeping, it will still force a poweroff).

I'm not sure when this happened exactly, but I do know some things that may have effected it is...

- I have deleted some things in Applications that didn't look very useful to me but I'm not sure what things they were.
- I have installed SynergyKM, Onyx, Maintenance, and Deeper. VLC and Adium too but I don't know if they would effect anything.
- I have my keyboard layout in Dvorak, it took me a little while to find the login option that actually allows me to use it to put my password.

I love OSX (even though I disagree with BSD and the licenses it uses) but I know very little about it. I have much more experience with GNU/Linux and Windows so I'm not really trying to wade in the deep end.

Oh, and this is on an ancient Pismo Powerbook G3.

I found a solution. I just created a new account and everything was fine again. I guess one or more of the preference files were broken, I could hunt down exactly which one but this G3 isn't so good for logging out and back in over and over.