ThinkVantage key on ThinkPad X61

[Ben Liblit]

ThinkPads have an extra blue key that has been labeled ThinkPad, Access 
IBM, or ThinkVantage over the years: 
<http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkPad_Button>.  On my ThinkPad X61, 
this key does not generate any useful behavior by default, and does not 
even generate X KeyPress events that I might bind as a shortcut of my 
choosing.  xev reports nothing whatsoever when I press this key. 
However, hald is definitely noticing the event; when running in verbose 
it prints:

     addon-acpi.c:189: event is 'ibm/hotkey HKEY 00000080 00001018'

My understanding is that HAL is supposed to forward weird extra keys 
like these as regular key press events.  If that's the intent, then 
HAL's handling of this key is not yet working as intended.  I don't 
really know where to start for fixing this; can anyone recommend a next 
step to take?

Software environment:

     base distro:    Fedora 8
     Linux kernel:   2.6.23.9-85.fc8
     hal:            0.5.10-1.fc8
     hal-info:       20071030-1.fc8
     thinkpad_acpi:  0.18-20071203

The kernel, hal, and hal-info are the current standard Fedora 8 builds. 
  The thinkpad_acpi kernel module is a newer release than the 0.16 
version included standard with Fedora 8's current kernel.  This newer 
release is supposed to fix a number of problems with *61 ThinkPads.  It 
does make some things work better, but the ThinkVantage key is still 
troublesome as described above.