U3-autorun: A U3 Launchpad replacement to launch your own applications.

I have written an application called U3Autorun that is designed to replace the launchpad code in the U3 partition of U3-enabled flash drives. The application, when run from the U3 partition, performs the following actions:

1) Spawns a copy of itself to a temp folder on the user's hard drive.
2) The copy then scans the root directories of all removable drives
for a file u3-autorun.ini.
3) If it finds this file, it scans it for the name of the executable
to run relative to it.
4) Finding that, it runs the executable.
5) Optionally, it will wait for the executable to finish running and
eject the device it was called from.
6) Finally, it deletes itself.

Thus, it behaves in exactly the same manner as the U3 Launchpad, but it allows the user to select the program to run. It doesn't use a clunky flash interface, nor does it require any kind of funky "u3 format". It frees you to do whatever you want with your drive and run whatever you want. This could be outstanding when combined with something like USB Autostart or Pstart or something similar, because it would allow you to truly run your own start menu transparently from your thumbdrive (just like the U3 Launchpad does, but with your own choice of application).

U3Autorun is fully open source. I have tested it on windows XP systems, and it should also work on NT/2000 systems (and probably 98/ME as well, though I don't have testing systems for these O/Ss).

Obviously, it only works right now if you can flash to the U3 Partition. I believe that limits it to Cruzer drives at this time, but our understanding of how to do this is increasing, and it is my hope that it will increase even further with the release of a fully-featured autorun application like this one.

So, I need some people to download it, use it, and tell me what they think. In particular, I'd be interested to see how it behaves on win2000 systems, and 98/ME systems. It's .NET-independant and programmed with core win32 libraries, so it should work just fine (and has in my testing).

You can download the application here.
...and the U3 Flasher from Cruzer here.

If you're not familiar with this technique, you can read the first document detailing it here. You don't need to set up a fake webserver or anything like that anymore, you can just put the iso in the same directory as LPInstaller.exe and it should work. See my readme.txt for more information.

Happy testing.