<windows root>\system32\hal.dll corrupt

From the beginning...

System was acting strangely slow one afternoon (very unresponsive to mouse clicks... ect.) So I rebooted and began to receive a flash of the blue screen of death followed by an immediate reboot. I then attempted to press F8 while starting the system to tell it to not restart on blue screen of death, however I never made it that far as I started receiving VGA failure errors verbally from my mother board. I then proceeded to reset the BIOS to defaults. and then received the following error:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<windows root>\system32\hal.dll corrupt

So my next step was to grab the OS CD and attempt to run the Windows Recovery Council. From there I ran chkdsk /r, rebuilt the boot.ini file, with no such luck. My next step was to try and recover my windows installation as I have only been backing up my data lately and not the OS. I was to find the when attempting to do a repair install on the system it did not recognize the prior OS.

I then had the idea, this may be my hard drive, so I purchased a brand new drive, installed and loaded windows xp pro 64 bit. This took a few times as the system was having a hard time reading from the CD-ROM drive, so beings I have two, I loaded the disc into the other and managed to get through the install. (the system still and trouble loading files for the install but made it through after me telling it to retry many times.)

So The system boots up and I installed the chipset, network, audio drivers. Then I head off to the Windows Update to start loading all updates available. System blue screens on me during updates, and after restart I get the verbal Failed VGA from my motherboard again. I power off/on and boot back into windows and attempt to do windows updates again. This time I get an error stating service pack install failure.

I then started loading windows updates in small groups, and ones I wouldn't think would cause problems. Eventually I was able to load all of them but a security update. At this point the verbal VGA failure error went away and the system seemed to be doing fine aside from installing the windows update, Adobe CS3 Master collection, and VMware Workstation, usually resulting in results stating I had a bad CD or network drive (was installing from new hard drive)

After some time I am getting close to getting my system up and running again. I have loaded most of my apps, aside the ones that are not working and the system started acting non-responsive as it did in the beginning, so what do I do, restart again to find the following error again:

<windows root>\system32\hal.dll corrupt

now here I sit on a LiveDVD of knoppix posting to the hardware forums of geeks to go in hopes a brilliant tech out there may have an answer or suggestion for me....

Thank you for taking the time to digest this issue as I understand it is a long winded one.