Keyboard Shortcut Unresponsiveness

Greetings potential allies in my fight against minor inconveniences!
I recently acquired a MacBook Pro after having endured years of Windows use, and am enamored with it. I am especially fond of the Exposé and the View Desktop keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, due to the default hardware mapping of all of the F# keys, Exposé must normally be accessed through Fn+F9. This is especially troublesome for my hands to reach, and limits my ability to instantaneously impress users of other operating systems. Thus I desired to change my shortcuts, and as I have no reason for a Dashboard keyboard shortcut, I hoped I could swap the defaults for the two functions (Dashboard to F9 and Exposé to F12, which lacks any hardware association). I did just this in system preferences, and all works fine. However, when I shut down my computer and reboot, the shortcut for "All Windows" magically reverts back to F9--a most grievous problem. No matter which key I map "All Windows" to, it always defaults back upon reboot or log out to F9. This is untrue of all other shortcuts, as I can change any other default successfully--so I am baffled.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, as this is one of very few problems which mar an otherwise flawless system.
Many thanks!
MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.6)

One thing you might consider trying is to invert the function of the fn key. This is controlled by the "Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features" checkbox, which when ticked means that you no longer need press the fn key at the same time as the F9-F12 keys. Of course, to alter brightness, volume etc. you must then press the fn key, but this is usually less of a problem as the relevant keys are well to the left making them easy to span with a single hand.
As for retaining the change, I have not encountered this problem, but you could try deleting the User—>Library—>Preferences—>com.apple.systempreferences.plist file and subsequently resetting your preferences.
In any case, shutting down and restarting a computer is a Windows habit—there's little or no point in doing this on a Mac. When in "sleep" mode, the machine uses almost no power at all. I regularly have machines running continuously for 10 weeks or more!
Hope this helps,
Archie

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