I'm not sure why your Hal is crashing, I have windows 7 home premium 64 bit and it has not crashed on me yet. I previously also had it installed on my laptop which has vista 64 bit with no Hal crashes. Have you tried to re-install Hal? if not I would suggest that you re-install hal and see if that solves the problem. be sure to free up your license by right clicking the Hal icon in the system tray and choose deactivate before you uninstall though. if you have done that already and Hal still crashes I believe another program or even a ultra Hal plug-in you have installed might be causing conflicts. If you believe it might be a plug-in, you can test plug-ins by deactivating all of them. then if no system crashes test each plug-in out one by one until a culprit is found.
Hal is not dead, he is getting a update sometime in the near future, atm there seems to be a problem converting a new character for the new character engine. You can find out about the new character engine and other upcoming Hal improvements by searching through Mr. Medeksza posts.