All I wanted was a global hot key to go to the next/previous track in iTunes. Sometimes iTunes goes to a song you don't want, and you want to skip to another without using the Dock or switching to iTunes from whatever you're doing. I wrote two tiny AppleScripts to control iTunes, and then looked for ways to assign them to keys. No luck with function keys as in OS 9 (what ever happened to the F-key section from the keyboard control panel?), so Dragthing came to the rescue.
I didn't want anything to jump into the foreground, so I set up a new dock (called 'hotkey scripts') and set it to 'allow AppleScripts to run in background' in the Miscellaneous preferences tab. I then added my scripts to the new dock, and used the 'item options' from the contexual menu to set a hotkey for each. I set it so that Apple+left and right arrows are previous and next track, but any key combo would do it, presumably as long as it's not used elsewhere. The Applescripts, for anyone interested, are simple:
tell application "iTunes"Replace next with previous for the other script, obviously.
next track
end tell
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020416094133802