Shoutbox

My (non-laptop) keyboard has a full-hardware self-contained F Lock button. No program can know when I press it or what the F Lock state is. When t's on, the function keys work like normal. When it's off, it just sends a different scancode for the function keys (they do things like Undo, Redo, Save, Print etc).

You mentioned that the keycode scanner won't detect what keycode is recieved when you use the graphics hotkeys. Try disabling the hotkeys (or changing them) temporarily, and the to find the keycode. I don't think that thge problem is that the shortcut includes FN, it's that it's being used by the graphics driver right now. If you decided to change the shortcut to something that doesn't use Fn, you would have to find out the keycode(s) for the new shortcut before you actually change the shortcut to that.

Fn key is a pain in the posterior.  There is no standard and different vendors implement it differently.

In some cases, Fn key itself will have a keycode and when pressed in combination with certain other keys, cause them to produce different keycodes.  In other cases, it may not have a keycode of its own, but the combinations still do.  In yet other implementations, Fn key combinations trigger ACPI events and thus have no keycodes at all. 

It sounds like that may be the case with yours.  It is possible to programmatically hook (or trigger) ACPI events, but keyboard mapping software wouldn't be of much help there.

Although you are using Windows, this is a hardware question and you should be a able to Google up a lot of discussion of this (possibly including information specific to your laptop brand and model) in the context of running Linux on laptops.  Linux laptop user community has invested a lot of time trying to make use of the the Fn key combinations and discovering how different vendor implementations work.