This is what I have found:
Microsoft security patch 967715 (July 2009) disabled autorun for CD/DVD roms,usb drives,network drives etc. These settings can be changed by the user by modifying the registry key NoDriveTypeAutoRun located in HKEY_Current_User\software\microsoft\Windows\Current version\policies\explorer\ using Microsoft's instructions for enabling autorun for various devices.
Now before I installed PD8 I could modify these settings. After installation of PD8 the key is there but is now a Reg_binary versus what it was before Reg_DWORD and appears to contain its own unique settings.