I would suspect that your hard drive may have failed or is not properly cabled/jumpered. If you have not recently opened your computer, you might consider running a scandisk on the primary hard drive. If you recieve multiple errors on each scan, you can assume the hard drive has failed.

As a final note, it is possible that the boot sector of your hard drive has recently been damaged. Installing another operating system or 'ghosting' software can cause this to occur. You can repair a master boot sector in the command prompt of Windows repair.

http://www.nocrash.com/bb/messages/3513.shtml

I applogize. I was tired when I read your post and mistook system32/hal to be the file in question when really you were just talking about hal.dll in the System32 folder.

Oh well, if we don't look dumb sometimes, then we get overconfident.

Try booting your computer to a command prompt/MSDOS prompt and expand the file from the .cab file (appropriate to your version of windows) and reinstalling the file back into your system32 directory or where it belongs for your operating system version.

Not sure of your experience level due to your very elaborate post. Let me know if you need further help.

Computerpilot.