I just thought I would add this in here for any other users who may be experiencing difficulty getting HAL to work these days...
I was all exited when I finally built my new PC, and went all out on the best hardware. HAL installed successfully in Vista 64 bit edition, and everything seemed fine...until I tried to run HAL. The chat window would appear and he would freeze and then crash after a minute or so. To make a long story short, the problem was not Hal, it was the Haptek software that runs the animated character. The problem is not even the 64 bit OS, but it is the hardware! My new system has the Intel core i7 processor, which runs four cores, hyperthreaded, so to the OS it appears that there are 8 total cores in task manager. I had not had any trouble running older programs before, but it looked like the Haptek player could not handle this kind of processor because I found the stand alone Haptek player wouldn't work. Amazingly, hal would work just fine if I selected a non-haptek, ms agent character. But how disappointing! Luckily, I was able to fix this! So listen up anyone who is thinking of building a similar system...To get the haptek player to work just like it always did, you have to go into your system BIOS, and DISABLE hyperthreading technology. There is also an option that lets you choose the number of active cores, (options are 1, 2, or ALL), you must choose 1. Let your system boot with these settings, and your Haptek will work just fine! This is kind of disappointing but it appears that lack of further development with Haptek has caused it to become antiquated enough that it cannot handle some of the newer hardware out there. But at least I still get to have Hal on my new system.