From the outset,  I’ve been aggravated by the fact that Foresight’s distribution of the Gnome desktop automatically opens Banshee when I load an audio CD.

I figured out how to use the gconftool-2 to prevent that from happening:

gconftool-2 –type boolean –set /desktop/gnome/volume_manager/autoplay_cda “false”

This can be run as an unprivileged user, and writes the data to the following xml schema file so the setting works across reboots.

~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/volume_manager/%gconf.xml

You can check the current settings for the volume_manager – both default and custom with:
gconftool-2 -R /desktop/gnome/volume_manager