<p>My company has tried to adopt the scrum methodology with mixed success.  Theses are some areas where we've had issues.  How do you handle these? </p>

<ol>
<li>Tracking requirements from
Product Marketing through to product.  We're trying out JIRA to track all requirements individually and assigning a release to each one as it is picked for implementation.</li>
<li>Who creates stories? Product
Management who doesn't know enough
to create effectively small stories,
developers who may not have domain
knowledge, an analyst in between?</li>
<li>Functional specs

<ol>
<li>do you write them or just try to get them into a story
definition?</li>
<li>Do you write functional
specs per story?  Per feature?</li>
<li>How do you see the relationship between functional specs and stories?</li>
</ol></li>
<li>answering the question from people
with VP in their title "what are we
going to get by [8 months from
now]?"</li>
</ol>

You should translate your requirements into a Product Backlog. This backlog is what you use to decide what Sprint Backlog items are chosen for each Sprint iteration. Management decides what is on the Product Backlog, but the team needs to agree to what they can produce in the Sprint (this is a negotiation that occurs at every sprint).
Your Product Owner (usually a product manager) drives the creation of the stories. The Stories are simple (as a system admin, I need to be able to add a user). If your product management does not understand your product, you are in trouble.
Agile is about designing as required. The design is never in the story. The spec can be per story, or per feature. You could design all your CRUD inside of one spec, which covers multiple stories.
The Product Owner gets a product demo at the end of every Sprint. So value is demonstrated at every cycle. So your VP would get reports on a monthly basis (ususally 3 weeks of dev + 1 week to prepare for the Sprint demo).