Messing with autorun.inf
Like most of you, I have a USB key that I store some of my portable stuff on (quite useful if you move computers – say from home to work). I’ve found it extremely invaluable, especially when combined with PStart and RoboForm2Go. To make my life even easier, I whipped up an autorun.inf file for my USB key that would load up PStart for me when I plugged it in to the computer (well, close to it – it initiates Windows Vista’s AutoPlay feature which shows me a “Load Start Menu” action which I click to run PStart).
However, there was one very big problem that I encountered early on – the “shellexecute” and “shell\verb\command” actions did not work very well when there were spaces in the path names. Now, most of you would say, “well, did you quote the path names in double quotes?” – the answer is yes, I tried that. In fact, I tried all sorts of things and found that the only way I could get it to work was by using double quotes and having to specify the drive letter. That sucked – that meant that my portable USB key was no longer really portable, since if the drive letter wasn’t what was in my autorun.inf file, it wouldn’t run (or worse, run the wrong program). So that solution wasn’t acceptable – I had to find a solution.
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