dastaten,
I had a somewhat similar issue with Hal, after putting in the OS ( win8 ) again then Hal hal was unable to do things she could do before, I also upgraded to the latest version of hal. I posted the problems I was having at the forum and Robert M replied saying:
"What sort of problems are you having with Haptek? Without knowing the details, I've seen many issues with Haptek due to permission settings on the DLLs and files inside the Haptek folder. Haptek was made well before the more secure UAC permission system introduced in Windows Vista and this sometimes causes problems. I will put a workaround in Hal's installer for the next update to fix these Haptek issues, but you can do it manually now. Go to the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Haptek in windows explorer and right click on the "player" folder. Click "properties", "security", "edit". Add "everyone" and give it "full control" and click ok. "
Been pretty busy lately and I haven't done much work on Hal, putting it off till winter so I'm not sure if it's a fix yet but he's the person that should know.
Carl2