Explorer.exe behavior change in Win2k upon CD Eject

[Tawnos]

I've been googling and searching for this problem for the last couple days to no avail.
For this issue, we have two systems in the field, one using Windows 2000 SP3, the other using Windows 2000 SP4. Due to the nature of these machines, once the base configuration is locked nothing is changed (they do not connect to any network, so security is not an issue) unless there's a major bug found.

Here's the issue: once we image the base configuration to the hard drive, we run our custom installer to install our software. This software is opened through an explorer.exe window, and at the end of the install process the factory techinician is instructed to remove the cd from the drive and press the shutdown button. On the SP3 platform, ejecting the CD causes the file explorer window to close, so when shutdown is pressed there are no problems. However, with the SP4 system, if the cd is removed before shutdown is pressed, the system displays an "explorer.exe could not be terminated" window with a timer. This problem seems to be associated with the way the updated system is handling the ejection of CDs. Instead of closing the explorer window (like SP3) or moving the selection back to my computer (no service packs), windows pops up a "please insert media into drive" notification. Therefore, explorer returns "not responding" to the shutdown command, and shutdown does not finish until after the error is dismissed and explorer.exe killed.

One "fix" that causes the SP3 behavior of shutting down the explorer window immediately upon ejection of CD is to set HKEY_USER\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasks to 1. However, this has two negative side effects:
1) It's a blanket fix to a specific problem
2) It may cause unexpected behavior in the application software.


Do any of you know a registry key to alter the behavior of explorer.exe browsing removable media? That is, how to stop explorer from trying to view a drive where the removable media has been removed?

If you need clarification, please ask. Appreciate any help, I've googled extensively to no avail. At first we thought it was related to this issue: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322930/ but that no longer appears to be the case.

Thanks again.

 

[Tawnos]

Bumping, no input so far. Is the situation as I feared? Have I already troubleshot this problem beyond the forum? Surely somebody knows a registry tweak to address this specific issue.

 

[Tawnos]

Bump^2

 

[zeplar]

Don't suppose disabling AutoRun/AutoPlay, or the media change notification would work?

My only Windows 2000 box is a production server, unfortunately.

 

[Tawnos]

I ended up fixing it by disabling auto insert notification.

While that fixes the problem, I'm still interested to know why the varoius systems, all with the same registry settings, handle the ejection of CDs so differently.