volume hot keys in Crunchbang don't work

I've spent 2 hours on this and still can't figure this out. It's driving me insane. Please save my sanity. When I press mute, the pnmixer control in the top right shows that I've pressed mute, but the sound is not muted. A graphic also appears on my screen with a volume bar to show that the volume has been muted. When I press mute again, the pnmixer control shows that I have pressed the key, and **three** graphics appear on my screen in a row to show that I've pressed it. This doesn't make sense. No change in sound. With the volume up and volume down keys, the graphic changes accordingly but again no change in sound. I've tried editing rf.xml with the following: amixer set -q Master,0 5%+ amixer set -q Master,0 5%- amixer set -q Master,0 toggle I used xev to get the names of the key bindings. After reconfiguring or restarting openbox, or restarting my computer, this change in the script had no effect at all. Btw, uname -a gives me: Linux KGBXCrunch 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.35-2 x86_64 GNU/Linux