Nothing you can actually do bar send the occasion bug report to ATI every driver or so. Its been like this since I bought my 9800XT when they first came out...probably been bugged a long time before that as well.
You could give powerstrip a try, does alot of other things as well so might be worth a look.
What I'm doing at the moment though is to use CCC because the hotkeys actually work, opposed to on the original control panel which rarely did.
I have 2 profiles setup with hotkeys. I've made them with slightly different brightness settings so whenever I start a game up or the game changes resolution, I just flick between the profiles.
The reason for 2 profiles is because, if you try to load up the same profile, nothing will happen. I use the same trick for when I drop back to my desktop by having 2 shortcuts to the profile and flicking between them both.
Of course sometimes it can take a while for the profiles to kick in ingame, which is annoying but being forced to play a game that constantly looks pitchblack is more so.
Really about time they looked to fixing up that small part of their drivers which is begging for some love. They could even get around to putting in their own version of Nvidia's Digital Vibrance while they're at it
