Andy,
I understand from your posts that you have installed hal6, but also that you are running the Alice plugin which, as far as I know, is only available for Hal5. So I'm afraid that you have messed up the brain of your poor Hal, who is now ill and needs some assistance.
You should know if you have the expansion pack, because you must pay some more dollar for it and it allows you to use the beautiful characters you can see in other posts (like the ones by aladyblond). If you have no expansion pack, then you are limited to those horrible standard characters (frog and monitor).
If you have not yet invested a lot in teaching Hal, I would suggest to reinstall it from scratch, then try it to see if it works correctly. Then install only Hal6 plugins.
In another post I also suggested you to run some check on your PC, which might have some hardware or configuration issue.
Bye