I recently bought a Microsoft Arc keyboard to work with my ubuntu 10.10 maverick system and I am very happy with it.

Only one problem occured: When I hit one of the multimedia keys on it (Volume up, down or mute) my left mouse button stopped working. It seems like pressing a multimedia key is forcing a pushed down left mousebutton until you restart the x-server.

Really annoying, but the ubuntu guys have a fix for ubuntu maverick 10.10 in launchpads bugtracker already.

Install this Package for 32bit systems or this one for 64bit systems and reboot your system.

The annoying keyboard/mouse issue is gone.

Should work for ubuntu lucid 10.04 and other keyboards with multimedia Keys (Microsoft, HP, A4Tech) which suffer from this issue, too.
 

[UPDATE 18.01.2011]
Finally somebody had the same problem like me and came up with a better solution. The problem with what I wrote: Changes get lost on nautilus updates.

To get the "real deal", stick to Joeys How-To at OMG! ubuntu. Thanks for reading.

[/UPDATE]

to change the side pane colour in nautilus, open the gtkrc file for your theme

e.g.

sudo gedit /usr/share/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

and add

style "treeview-mod"
{  
    GtkTreeView::even_row_color   = "#F2F1F0"
}
widget "*NautilusNavigationWindow*" style "treeview-mod"

only issue: when switching the view to treeview, the background changes, too. But thats not so bad as you mostly use treeview when the folder is full, so that you never see the background in treeview anyway.

I did this with nautilus elementary mod, so I do not know if it fully works with the standard nautilus. 

Take a look at these threads at ubuntuforums to get your own clues:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1539296
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1381274

sudo mv /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service.disabled

to turn it on again, just run this
 

sudo mv /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service.disabled /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service