I think that I would maybe try to uninstall & reinstall the text-to-speech engines that are installed on your computer. Do you have any other MS Agent Based Programs, like CyberBuddy, that you can test your MS Agents and Voices on? If Hal is the only MS Agent Program on your computer you should try to determine if the problem is with Hal, or is it with the Text-To-Speech Engine, or is with the computer's hardware? Also, you may want to confirm that your computer meets all the recommended system requirements to run Hal. However, if a computer didn't meet all the system requirements a resulting problem would usually be slow speech not fast...but anything is possible when things go wrong.
