Run ‘fc-cache -f’ as root and as a normal user. Usually a distribution runs this when needed, but for some reason Mandriva didn’t (or there was some other problem). This caused all apps to start very, very slowly.
In GNOME 2.13.latest as described elsewhere the multimedia keys have been removed from the Keyboard Shortcuts capplet. You now need to correctly select your keyboard in the Keyboard capplet → Layouts → Keyboard model to make the multimedia keys work. Pretty annoying as I want the Play/Pause to work as a Pause key, not Play as GNOME/xorg thinks it is. Having that key set to Pause will make Audacious correctly switch between Play/Pause. But as removing the support fixes a major bug (ignoring modifiers like ctrl/alt when selecting ctrl-alt-p, allowing normal keys like ‘P’ to be used and not ‘unbinding’ the key to make ‘P’ work again) I can understand why it was removed.