Enabling and Disabling AutoRun in windows explorer

I use an external hard drive on my Windows XP box at home. What bothers me is that everytime I turn my hard disk on, the Explorer Shell starts its autoplay dialog. It scans the drive to determine the type content on the drive  (audio, video etc) and suggesting corresponding programs to open the content on drive (windows media player for audio, video etc).

I had been trying to find a way to turn this feature off, since I really dont want to autplay it. A quick search on msdn revealed this article which mentions how autorun can be disabled. All I needed to do is to go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\ and add a new binary value NoDriveAutoRun with a bit mask to specify the drives which i want disabled from AutoRun. So first bit set implied drive A would be disabled, second bit for B:, so and so forth. For my case I had to disable E, F, G, and H, so i put a bit mask of 0xF0. Autorun was diabled!! - Wohoo!.