Not only autorun is unsafe and recommended to be disabled by every security software, it is also hugely annoying, as far as I am concerned. With software cds, I normally put a disk in and switch to doing whatever else I was doing (like playing Dominions
to get back to running the disk when I feel like it - only to have the program autorun pop up and force me to do something about it. With non-executable disks, this useless "what do you want to do with the disk" window is nothing short of an abomination - I *know* what I have on the disk and what I am going to do with it, thank you very much, mr. Balmer. I do not need an offer to open it with windows explorer, I have a real file manager. I do not want to run an audio cd or a video dvd with WMP, I have decent music and video players. I am not going to "drag and drop files to record on a blank cdr", I have a proper cd recording program. And so on. That's the reason for "computer-literate luddism", we simply know better software options for our needs than the default crap windows is packaged with, and don't want it pushing its integrated garbage upon us.
As for chkdsk, 10 out of 9 times after incorrect shutdown (occasional hard reset is perfectly normal and rarely if ever hurts anything) it is unnecessary. Running it manually once in a while to get rid of excess lost fragments and other errors is, of course, a different thing.
How further offtopic can we go?
