AutoPlay non-functional in Win 10 Pro

spapakons · 11 May 2016

dalchina said:

Seriously bad idea. Registry cleaners attempt to look for leftovers, inconsistencies.. might find and 'clean' 100s of things- that really don't matter- and may well do damage not discovered until a lot later. There was a long thread on this until quite recently.

What we'd like to find is specific, focussed, and almost certainly not the sort of thing one of those would detect.

Could be change in value, a deletion, an addition... we just don't know.
If we knew roughly where to look, it would be possible to compare a user's entries where autoplay worked with one where it didn't.
Or, noting what is installed, progressively install those programs and test autoplay each time and discover which had that effect, then try uninstalling it and see what the effect was.

Very time consuming!

In that case, assuming we have a computer with working Autoplay and we extract any autoplay Registry entries in a REG backup file. Is there any utility that can compare the file with the Registry and highlight any differences? Then one could examine them and make out a solution.

dalchina · 11 May 2016

Regshot can compare registries - it's designed to take one snapshot, then you do sthg, then another snapshot, and it gives the differences- additions, changes, deletions.

However getting useful sources of comparison might be tricky. You'd really need a case where autoplay was working, snapshot, then you break it, snapshot, and compare. However, there may well be too many changes between a & b to make the comparison useful.

The snapshots would have to be from the same PC of course, and the same user.

Personally if I were to try to identify this, I'd start with this sequence until I got (maybe) autoplay working again (No guarantees of that!).
a. create a disk image of a non-working case (where USB flash drives and optical media were ignored)
b. progressively uninstall anything that supported mounting a disk (checking autoplay)
c. progressively uninstall anything related to burning disks (checking autoplay).
d. progressively uninstall any players or anything that could play media (checking autoplay).
e. progressively uninstall some other category I can't think of right now (checking autoplay).
f. Uninstall Virtualbox (if present).

Finally having identified a culprit, restore my image, check, uninstall the culprit, check autoplay.

Repeat if more than one culprit.

The converse would be like, namely this: start with a clean functional system, and install things until autoplay breaks.

Tedious... but once you have a simple case where you can go from autoplay working to not working by eg installing one program (assuming that's what happens) then you can use Regshot and compare snapshots.

Of course, it may also be to do with setting defaults for programs....

spapakons · 11 May 2016

I suspect the last (setting defaults for programs) is the culprit. In this case it would be easy to check. Create a new user account and check autoplay. If it works, then examine carefully the settings in any CD/DVD and media player application. Compare with the settings in your default user account. Change them to match and the problem could fix. Yes, it takes time, but it could be a solution.