hal.dll

No.
Boot to Recovery Console and use the following command.
expand d:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
D: is the drive letter of CD-ROM with Windows XP CD in it.

If your system came with Recovery CD, you have to borrow a XP CD. You may have to use the same edition, though (If yours is XP Home, borrow a XP Home CD).

Because you keep having the same problem, I suggest you do HD diagnostic test. If it failed, replace it. If it passed, do low level format and clean install Windows again.

Please add a comment if you need more info or help.

I really would recommend the HDD test but you'll need to know the maker of the Hard Disk Drive and download the Testing Utility from their Web Site and then run the test as recommended.

If the drive comes up as faulty on that M'Board try it on another M'Board and see if it comes up faulty again. If it does it's bad and needs replacing but if it comes up as good on the second M'Board either the Data Lead or M'Board are in a bad way and need some attention to get the unit working properly again.

If the drive comes up as Good on all tests then run a wiping utility like this one Boot & Nuke

http://tinyurl.com/4rfur

Then start off with a perfectly clean HDD and reinstall the complete OS. If you haven't completely wiped or written zeros to every sector something that was adversely impacting on the OS may have been carried across on the subsequent reloads and is what is killing the Hal.dll file.

If you have another XP computer you can lift the Hal.dll file from that and replace the corrupt or missing file on your system but you are likely to see this same message again in the not to distant future if you don't fix the root problem.

Col

see if this helps:
How to force a Hardware Abstraction Layer during an upgrade or an installation of Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299340/en-us