today i reinstalled the game a second time and tried again with the keys.dat file and what i found out is that it was the shortcuts file. i must have screwed something up last time i replaced them.
probably this: when you have installed the game it dosen't have any keys.dat file. when you start it up the first time it creates those so if you insert your saved key settings copy before first start it overwrites em with the default settings. this time i overwrite the default created with mine and it all worked fine so i belive its like this.