I was wrong once again. Even with vesa I have the same bug, but it's only reproducible if I press the play button (XF86AudioPlay) first. After that it'll not work until the next Xorg restart.
I will try to test it in a VM later to see what I find -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org