Multimedia keys does not work, when using Retrobat as shell.

Yes, this might seem like something of a special case, but I am using Retrobat as a "custom shell" instead of explorer.exe, meaning that I bypass explorer.exe at boot to keep a nice and tide batocera-esque look. Everything works great and I (and ChatGPT) have found a way for me to access the full explorer.exe by starting it from task manager, whereas in the beginning I only got file explorer. Everything is great.

I have since installed kodi and to my horror the multimedia-buttons on my media remote do not work. If I start explorer.exe, then they suddenly work and show the "system level" animation of the volume going up or down. As soon as I kill explorer they stop working.

I have tried faffing around to understand the issue. If I use a Kodi app called keymap editor, it does register the keypress as something it cannot process. I get the key id "16839168" no matter which of the multimediakeys I press. All the reguler keys on the remote works great. Why is it that the multimediakeys only works when explorer.exe is active and is there any way to make them work without? Yes, this is probably a rare case, but actually I would like to know why. I have tried chatting with CHATGpt and tried all kinds of different solutions, but nothing has worked? Anyone?

Solved it another way. I moved explorer.exe back as the shell and I got a vbs-script to silence a batch-script containing a nircmd command to hide the taskbar, running at boot with the help of task scheduler. I did give the desktop a solid black bagground colour, making everything nice and tidy - I don't even see the taskbar at boot! Now I just run a batch script on demand if I need the task bar back for some reason. It works like a charm.