Windows 10: AutoPlay non-functional in Win 10 Pro

Here's something interesting. If I restart the computer, the first time i put a disc in the drive it works as you would expect it to, depending on your autoplay settings. But anytime after that first time it just does nothing until you try to read from the drive in File Explorer. If you double click the D:/ drive icon it will spin up the drive and display the contents of that new disc I put in. Sometimes when it does that autoplay will pop up also but not always.

So maybe it's a problem with Explorer not refreshing and not so much with autoplay???

 

Hi, so I get 'tap to choose what happens' (= undefined) every time I insert an audio CD.
So I do that and choose a player (Zoom player)- which opens, but nothing plays.
I try inserting the CD again, the program (Zoom player, which is capable of playing audio disks) opens but nothing is played. (Noted also it could not be closed using the title bar x as usual- odd).

Wanting to change the default, I found nothing in Settings that would help, and no link to the Control Panel options. Have I missed that?

So I change the CD defaults in CP to open other programs.

Now inserting the disk, it plays - every time.

That's my experience, FWIW...!

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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...

 

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?

 

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...!'

 

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...

 

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.

 

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....

 

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.