personal settings -> keyboard & mouse -> global keyboard shortcuts problem

First let me start out by saying I’m new to Linux.

Having said that, I’m running openSUSE 11.3 with both the Gnome and KDE desktops
installed, but so far I’m only using Gnome. I was looking for a way to assign sound
volume increase/decrease to some keyboard keys instead of having to click on the
speaker icon at the bottom of the screen. I found what I included in the Title of this
message. Under the Global Keyboard Shortcuts was an item for each increase and
decrease sound volume. These were set to (I believe) meta+ and meta-, respectively.
I changed them to F12 and F11, respectively (to match my Apple keyboard). After the
changes, I started a game which takes over the entire screen (which is why I wanted
to assign the volume to keys in the first place) to see if the changes worked. They
did not! So, I tried to go back and change them to something else and now I can’t
even access Global Keyboard Shortcuts at all. I keep getting the following error:

Sorry - System Settings

Failed to contact the KDE global shortcuts daemon
Message: Could not get owner of name ‘org.kde.kglobalaccel’: no such name
Error: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner

What’s up and how do I recover from this (if I even care)?
Also, how do I assign volume increase/decrease to keys?

Thanks

Ron

I forgot to mention in my original post that the assignment of the sound volume increase/decrease to the F12 and F11
keys does work outside of the game, just not while the game is playing, so it doesn’t accomplish what I really wanted.