I had that problem for a long time. It took me a few days of troubleshooting to figure it out. AutoRun or AutoPlay was configured as enabled but every CD or DVD I inserted would not AutoPlay. I had to open it from My Computer. I even updated Roxio Easy Creator that was bundled with my system but that didn't work either.

I found this information in the Microsoft DataBase very helpful:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;330135&Product=winxp

What I found was I had two registry entries for:

NoDriveTypeAutoRun

One of the entries had an underscore prefix. I deleted the entry with the underscore prefix and AutoRun worked again.

Probably not relevant to your problem but I'll just mention that autoplay is normally set up in My Computer/right click on drive/Properties/Autoplay.  We don't want folk editing their registry unless it is really necessary.

I found a tool that may be of help to some with Autoplay problems in XP (that's for problems not settings).  It's a small file called Autofix.exe.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c680a7b6-e8fa-45c4-a171-1b389cfacdad&displaylang=en

Thanks for the tip, i downloaded autofix.exe and fixed the problem. Now autoplay works fine.

Inspiron 8600

win XP