AutoPlay non-functional in Win 10 Pro

the iron lamb · 03 Mar 2016

hi, I don't have a question or know how to post in a forum but i spent days trying to fix this and I know this information will help someone. if someone out there could please post this where it should go it will help alot of us out.

After running a registry cleaner, my autoplay no longer had any options. a usb drive only had configure for backup. and in the settings i did not have the option to chose the origional defaults either. after alot of searching I still came up empty handed but discovered where that information is sotred in the registry:

it is the autoplay handlers in : computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHING\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrntVersion\Explorer\AutoplayHandlers\Handl ers

also in event handlers.

I noticed I only had about 3 options. i upgraded my inlaws computer to windows 10 tonight and checked thier registry and there were about 20 options. so I exported the handlers folder and the event handlers folder to a usb, opened on my windows 10 PC and VOILA!!! all autoplay options now restored.

All i wanted to do was have autoplay oped usb drives to view folders and files. now i can!!

hope this helps! thanks forum ppl.

dalchina · 04 May 2016

Hi, my previous experience (above) of Autoplay was on my old laptop, clean install. My new laptop has proved to be a different matter- and someone with a similar one (same supplier) had the same experience.

As someone commented above, it seems that when you insert, for example, a blank disk, there is no indication of this to Windows. Explorer does not update.. it may still think the disk present is one that was there previously.

So what I tried was this very simple Autohotkey script:

Loop {
Sleep, 900
DriveSpaceFree, Space, z:\
}
; DVD/RW drive is Z:

This meant I could now get an autoplay notification, and explorer was updated, if I

inserted/ejected/inserted/ejected/inserted/ejected/ my blank disk

Without that script, I might get one notification the first time I inserted the disk.

ckl078 · 09 May 2016

I have a similar issue, autoplay will only work if 'This PC' is open, if it's closed then the autoplay does not work. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

dalchina · 10 May 2016

If I create a new user, autoplay works for CDs, DVDs without using a script to poll the drive.
In my normal admin account, I now need that script running for it to work.

It never works for USB flash drives. It always works for USB HDDs.

There's no difference between explorer views - This PC or other - in my case.

This suggests there is a user setting or registry entry that is easily corrupted for optical disks, or some conflict with something installed.

spapakons · 10 May 2016

dalchina said:

If I create a new user, autoplay works for CDs, DVDs without using a script to poll the drive.
In my normal admin account, I now need that script running for it to work.

It never works for USB flash drives. It always works for USB HDDs.

There's no difference between explorer views - This PC or other - in my case.

This suggests there is a user setting or registry entry that is easily corrupted for optical disks, or some conflict with something installed.

Most likely some DVD or media player application added some settings in the Registry that affected autorun. The new user has the default settings and autorun works, but your admin user has different settings. I suspect it has to do with lower and upper filters, but not sure.

dalchina · 10 May 2016

Just tried setting Windows Media Player as default for everything.. made no difference. I'm not too keen on spending time uninstalling software to see if that makes any difference, but it must be sthg like that.

Could be a player, or software that includes mounting disks, which includes anything from Power ISO to Macrium Reflect, or burning software, and I think I noted a suggestion somewhere that VirtualBox might affect it...

spapakons · 10 May 2016

I recall back in the days of Windows 98 there were some third-party autoplay utilities. Is there anything similar for Windows 10 one could use to bypass Windows's default?

dalchina · 10 May 2016

Well, with my wee little script, the only thing that doesn't work is autoplay for flash drives, and until this emerged as a problem, I'd not been using autoplay, so practically I'm not too worried.

There was a utility for fixing autoplay for XP.. MS seems to have dropped Fixits.. sometimes there's a leftover link they've not updated that points to one 'This article applies to xxx but you're using Windows 10....'.

Essentially if a program overwrites sthg in the registry it shouldn't, that's
a. MS's architecture lacking protection and
b. bad programming and testing.

But we can't really comment on that until we have a more precise idea, which could be difficult. 'Something in the registry...!'

spapakons · 10 May 2016

Got an idea! If this is a Registry problem, then why not fix the Registry? I would use RegCure or other similar utility and see if that helps, although I guess the chances are too small...

dalchina · 10 May 2016

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!