[bryanthompson]

it's a new virtual machine, never installed before. It looks like my disk might be scratched... I'll try cleaning it and trying again. I've done some more reading, and it looks like this isn't a common problem. It looks like the hal.dll gets dropped for one reason or another after it's installed, sometimes, but this fresh install issue sounds different.

So... i'm going to try to make an image of my xp install disk, thinking maybe that'll fix it. or at least rule out faulty media.