I have set my Autoplay settings to do nothing for nearly all content types but Windows 7 (and Windows Vista before it) insists of popping up a "Searching for Content" window and churning any drives I plug in for several minutes before deciding that I want it to do nothing. This is intensely annoying because I have a 320GB external drive that is full of many content types... that is plugged in and removed several times during each day. I'd like to configure Windows to check for an autorun file in the root ONLY and, should one not be found, just do nothing? Even better: disable autorun COMPLETELY for everything except optical media. Failing the first two, I think I'd just like to get rid of autorun across the board. P.S.: I remember reading somewhere that Windows 7 had autorun disabled for all non-optical drives, by default. A pity this isn't the case.

I had this same very annoying problem and solved it by going into Control Panel -> Autoplay and removing the tick from "Use AutoPlay for all media and devices". I would recommend everyone disables autoplay, it's a huge security risk.

Thank you, but this disables autoplay entirely... not just for non-optical media. That said, it is what I have chosen to do for now, until I learn more.

Seriously, leave it disabled. Autorun is one of the most dangerous features of Windows.

I usually just let it prompt me what I want it to do.MCSE, MCSA, MCDST