need help with installing new operaating system on daughter's pc

when pc is turned on after bios screen it goes black and leaves this message; invalid boot. ini file, booting from c/windows, <windows root>/system32/hal. dll missing or corrupt. She says that she was hacked into by someone.

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Joined 2005-05-03
when pc is turned on after bios screen it goes black and leaves this message; invalid boot.ini file, booting from c/windows, <windows root>/system32/hal.dll missing or corrupt. She says that she was hacked into by someone. Does anyone know how to fix this problem? I'm very new at all this.
thanks

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690 Posts
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Boot off the XP CD and do a repair install over the existing Windows installation to fix these files.
 

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316 Posts
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Joined 2004-08-23
When you get it back up and working, visit windows update and download the updates, install antivirus and a firewall and also scan your pc regularly with Spybot and/or Ad-aware.
 
I'd recommend Trend Micro's Internet Security suite. It has a good firewall (similar to Zone Alarm), Spam filter, plus parental control, spyware detection and of course antivirus. I also found it not to slow down the machine to a crawl and also it updates automatically without a hitch (these 2 problems I had with Norton).
 
Trend Micro should shout if it sees anykind of trojan activity, hence (hopefully) not repeating what has already happened.
 
Good luck