to completely stop autoplay you need to do a couple of things:
1) get the MS TweakUI powertoy.
under My Computer | AutoPlay | Drives, uncheck your drives.
under Types, uncheck both CD/DVD and Removable.
Reboot.
This will stop MOST autoplay behaviour. Note however that the default
double-click action for a drive w/ a disk inserted that has an autoplay
entry in its root will be AUTOPLAY, so an reflexive double-click of the
drive icon will still perform the autoplay on you - BE CAREFUL!
[the main reason for disabling AUTOPLAY to to prevent CDs from bolting
right into their SETUP.EXE programs when the disk is installed. Often
these buggers install some kind of copy-protection thingee, like the Sony
rootkit fiasco.]
If you are still annoyed occasionally then try adding these:
2) Using My Computer right-click | Manage, the Services section, set the
Shell Hardware Detection service to Disabled. Do this also to the
Human Interface Device Access service.
Disabling these service kills the final autoplay junk, BUT it may be
overkill for your particular system. SOME special keyboard/mice/scanner
buttons may stop working properly w/ these services disabled, so disable
one at a time and check. Note that you may notice that your DVD drives
are not ID'd as such by Windows Explorer anymore, they appear as simple CD
drives. That's ok, they will still work just fine, it's just the labeling
that's affected.
