Recurring HAL.DLL missing/corrupt problem

WinXP Home SP3 - I've been working on a Dell tower off and on since November, and about every 3-5 weeks, the dreaded "HAL.DLL is missing or corrupt" error keeps coming up. I've been able to repair the problem w/o any data loss in the past, but the client and I are getting a bit tired of the repeated problem. Viruses and malware have never been found on the PC, and nothing in the Event Viewer points to anything that would cause this, but there is a fairly steady occurrence of an error in the Event Viewer: "the SSDP discovery service service has failed to start" followed by the reason it failed to start, and it usually occurs twice in a row and this happens maybe 6 times weekly (maybe once a day). I'm pretty sure that this SSDP error has nothing to do with the HAL.DLL errors since the SSDP error happens almost daily, but the PC still works fine, and the HAL.DLL error pops up roughly once a month.

Any ideas, suggestions, thoughts, or advice will be greatly appreciated.
THX!

 

Thanks for the suggestions....

1. an extended HD diagnostic is running as I type this, I'll know the results in the morning. However, I have run a diagnostic each time this problem has occurred and the drive has passed the factory tests each time. RAM diagnostics have been 100% OK in the past also.
2. there's definitely not too many things hooked up to the PSU: 1 hard drive, 1 DVD drive, motherboard. That's it.
3. haven't considered boot.ini yet - good thought! I'll look at it and maybe run a bootcfg /rebuild just to be sure (maybe a fixboot and/or fixmbr while I'm at it). I didn't notice if there was PowerQuest and/or Partition Magic installed, but I'll look for those also.

I'll post any progress (or lack of rolleyes) and test results tomorrow when I'm back at the PC....

Thanx again!

 

I think that the boot.ini may have had something to do with the problem, but it's still a mystery as to why the problem occurs (on average) once every 4-5 weeks. A normal boot.ini file on a PC running a single-partition hard drive and WinXP Home should look like this:

On the PC in question, there was a FAT32 partition of 35mb w/o a drive letter assigned which required the use of "partition(2)" instead of the normal "(1)". I removed the 35mb partition, changed the boot.ini file as needed, and called it "done". I had the PC functional and booting before making this change, but maybe this change will stabilize the problem.... I guess I'll know for sure in 3-5 weeks!
LOL

Thanks for the suggestion plodr!!!

(BTW - all diagnostics again passed 100% - no problems with HD or RAM or PSU, and no PowerQuest or Partition Magic installed)