Update/closure..............
Before undertaking a system restore my brother advised me to check out the following within the registry, it transpired that within the explorer policies the autoplay was disabled, I changed the value from '0x000000FF (255)' (Disabled) to
0×00000091 (hexadecimal), restarted the PC and autoplay now works as before, how it got disabled in the first place is anyone's guess but this very small setting, buried deep within the explorer policy sorted it and saved a system restore, details as below:
Ensure that correct NoDriveTypeAutoRun and/or NoDriveAutoRun policy value is set
NoDriveTypeAutoRun
registry key is used by Group Policy to configure whether to disable the Autoplay feature on all drives of the type specified. To check this setting, run Registry Editor (
regedit), and navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
or (note that above registry value, if exists, will always supersede the below user-specific key),
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
Locate the
NoDriveTypeAutoRun registry entry on the right pane. The registry key is in DWORD hexadecimal value, which each bit determines which type of drive to disable or enable AutoPlay feature. There are many possible value for NoDriveTypeAutoRun, some possible wrong value that disable AutoPlay are:
0x000000B5 (181) disable AutoRun on CD-ROM drives, plus default unknown drive, removable drive (meant for floppy or ZIP), network drive and reserved drive type.
or
0x000000FF (255) disable AutoRun/AutoPlay on all drive types.
The best bet is to set NoDriveTypeAutoRun to default value of
0×00000091 (hexadecimal) or
145 (decimal)
Thank you for your help.