I’ve been triple-booting for some time now, this problem is a first for me… but i knoes how to do it 
… just for some reason vista did NOT play nice with private xp files, and that may have triggered my spontaneous errors with hal.dll… in any case, XP is back on with drivers and anti-virus and basic stuff. I would just push vista over into a VM but i don’t know any VM software for linux that supports 64-bit virtualization (vista 64)
