So, long story short: I uninstalled a program and it fucked my computer all to hell and back. I got the Mac partition back up and running, updated to leopard and everything. But the Windows partition, even after a repair attempt and a re-install, just says "hal.dll" is missing and therefore I should stick my dick in my ear.
Any advice on how to address this that isn't "completely destroy your computer and build it back from the ground up"?
A HAL is the hardware abstraction layer. That's not really going to help you sort out the problem you're having though. Apparently the issue with a missing hal.dll is often a problem accessing the boot partition.
Posts
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_haldll_missing.htm
There they mention incorrect settings in the BOOT.INI related to multi-booting, since you're doing multi-booting I suspect this may be helpful.