Bizarre Incident With Autoplay Service in XP

[Dissipate]

Yesterday I was on my laptop and I opened and closed my CD ROM drive with nothing inside of it. All of a sudden my hard drive started going crazy and these endless Autoplay windows kept coming up in some kind of infinite loop. So I opened up the task manager and saw that 'svchost' was doing it. So after ending the task on 'svchost' the Autoplay endless loop stopped. At that point I knew it was some service. I went into the Services manager in order to find the culprit. I found a service called 'Shell Hardware Detection' and disabled it. Then I opened and closed my CD ROM drive with nothing in it and nothing happened. So it was the 'Shell Hardware Detection' service. The description for this service is: 'provides notification for autoplay hardware events.'

My question is: what could have caused this service to act up like it did and could the problem have been caused by a deeper underlying hardware problem?

 

[l3ored]

sloppy programming

 

[BehindEnemyLines]

What happens when you try to Enable the service again? Have you tried scanning for malware and viruses? Any recent software installation that could've interferred with AutoPlay like virtual machines, etc...Does the CD-ROM work properly right now with the service disabled when you insert a CD? I'm not sure if it's "sloppy" programming by any means (although it's possible). It's just that svchost.exe runs most of the critical services in Windows.

 

[Nothinman]

My question is: what could have caused this service to act up like it did and could the problem have been caused by a deeper underlying hardware problem?

Yea, I've only ever seen that Window popup when inserting a disc so my first guess would be that your drive freaked out and started telling Windows over and over that a new disc was inserted.

sloppy programming

Please expand on this, I'd love to see where you go with that.

 

[Dissipate]

Originally posted by: BehindEnemyLines
What happens when you try to Enable the service again? Have you tried scanning for malware and viruses? Any recent software installation that could've interferred with AutoPlay like virtual machines, etc...Does the CD-ROM work properly right now with the service disabled when you insert a CD? I'm not sure if it's "sloppy" programming by any means (although it's possible). It's just that svchost.exe runs most of the critical services in Windows.

If I enable the service it goes nuts just as before. Yes, I ran spyware doctor and nothing came up. Drive seems to be working OK with a CD.