Originally posted by slayer:

I spent some dedicated time on the issue... and it was the FN settings on the keyboard. By default I have they keyboard set to do the secondary functions like volume and mute etc (which only exist on F5-F12, hence F1 and F2 still working). I didn't realise this was carrying over into the game profile. I'm too old to make such rookie mistakes haha.

Ha, I feel your pain on that! When I first got my current laptop, there was an error in the BIOS settings that caused the keyboard to start out in that mode by default. Wasn't long until I finally learned to love Fn+ESC (aka "Fn-Lock"), at least until I finally spotted the incorrectly set option...