Hal.dll is killing me during XP installation!

I've searched the internet for this problem and found many people with various home-brewed solutions, but none of them have worked for me.

My Problem: I have the Boot Camp Assistant partition the drive successfully. Restart into the XP setup, format the drive again (just to be safe) and install. XP Setup restarts, and I am met with a DOS prompt stating "Windows cannot load because the file C: \windows\system32\hal.dll is corrupted or missing."

I've tried to repair boot.ini in the recovery console and also manually replaced hal.dll. Nothing works and I don't understand why. This never happened during the beta, I just wanted to reinstall Windows in the spirit that I had just reinstalled OS X.

Some forums have questioned whether the install was a bad disk. Mine is definitely fine, I tested it on another machine and a virtual machine via Parallels. I was just wondering if anyone had had this issue and solved it.

So frustrating, I want some games to play for Iraq and I'm leaving in a week

For the few that might run into this issue, I solved my situation:

After creating the partition and rebooting into the Windows setup, I deleted the random 200~ MB partition and the BOOTCAMP partition created by the Bootcamp Assistant. I then recreated my NTFS (or FAT32) partition from both of those chunks of free space. This seems to have solved my problem.

that will do it... (happend to me too)

if you have VMWare Fusion installed, you must uninstall it using VMWare's included uninstaller in order to install XP in Boot Camp