Crit

Yeah, it doesn't help me at all. I don't know what else to tell you guys - I'm at a total loss.

Not to hijack the thread or anything, but I'm having a very similar problem. I'm trying to resinstall XP on a formatted drive and after rebooting after setup, I'm prompted with hal.dll is missing or corrupt. I've copied it from other cab files but can't expand it off my cd directly (access denied). This one file is keeping me from getting anything done, and I'm at a loss. I've been through bootcfg and everything's correct - it's a single-partition and single drive. Any idea what's up?