How to have control over the automatic mounting of USB drives on Windows?

I use Windows 11 Pro or Enterprise. At a conference, I've had to plug into my computer lots of USB drives from coworkers, and I don't necessarily trust the USB drives to be virus-free. (note, however, BadUSB-type attacks don't concern me, I trust these drives to be real USB storage devices.) To browse the files in USB drives, I use a VirtualBox virtual machine. I manually pass the USB drive to the VM in the USB passthrough menu. The problem is the drive is still mounted temporarily for a brief time (during which windows may do potentially dangerous things like generating thumbnails for images/

Question by sextrism on Super User, licensed CC BY-SA. We show a short excerpt and link to the original thread as credit.