How do I fix autoplay on Windows XP SP2?

My colleague Chris Buechler has certainly seen this one many a time, so I'll let him help you out here. Chris explains: "The owner of the company at my previous employer was a digital photography nut, and had this problem at least every other month or so!"

Windows contains a feature known as "autorun" that causes certain actions to be taken when you insert removable media. Unfortunately, Windows XP seems to like to repeatedly break this functionality on some systems. Luckily, there is an easy fix available from Microsoft. They provide a utility called "Autofix.exe", as described in this knowledge base article.

While the bottom of the above article claims this was fixed in XP Service Pack 2, we can attest that some of us have used this utility ourselves on SP2 to fix the exact problem you describe.

To download Autofix, go to Microsoft's download area, type
autoplay in the keywords box, and click Go. You'll see the Autoplay Repair Wizard. Download and run it, and follow the simple instructions in the program.

Then log off and log back onto your computer (restart it to be on the safe side) and it should work again.

This has worked numerous times for Chris. The only "gotcha" he's run into is forgetting to log off after running the utility, in which case the change does not take effect until you finally do remember to log out and log in again.

Alternatively, if you'd rather use something not from Microsoft, here are a couple of useful tools that can help you quickly fix the problem, both ingeniously called "Autoplay Repair":

• Autoplay Repair from Top Drawer Downloads

• Autoplay Repair from Softpedia

That should get you back and working!