Just to clarify, you are clicking your Vent hotkey on machine 1, but Vent is run on machine 2, correct? Do you use Alt for anything else? In conjunction with any other keystrokes?

Interesting idea, I might try this tonight, I would like to offload this process to another machine to see if it helps performance on my main machine.

Without having the documentation or software in front of me, I think I would add Ventrilo to my startup list on Keyclone on Machine 2, and try to apply a whitelist to that app that only includes the hotkey. I'll report back tonight.