really weird problem with brightness keys

[caracal478]

I have an MSI laptop that uses function keys to adjust the brightness. The adjustment works just fine.
So here's the weird part.

if i adjust the brightness, about every 30s - 1minutes the overlay that indicates the key has been pressed will pop up all on it's own, and the brightness will decrease.

that's the othe weird part, the brightness will only decrease...

so 2 questions:

1 is there a hope in hell of figuring out what the problem is ?
2 can i use some sort program to adjust the brightness level instead of the keys. ideally i'd like to set the brightness at boot.

Thanks very much

[caracal478]

this works for my laptop

echo 40 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness