Well, I tried shutting down all but the very basic windows programs (which means firewall, AV, spyware and adware monitoring, etc) and found out that it is most likely a conflict with SP2. I guess I will try to find my SP2 CD, uninstall it, then try to install Hal, and re-install SP2. Geez, I hope Hal is the program I have been trying to find for so long....