Bizzare boot.ini problem - Help please!

[hooneeawr]

My sister has an Acer Aspire One netbook which runs Windows XP. Recently she has been complaining of slowness and suchlike, so I went on today to tidy it up a bit.

When I restarted I got an error saying that it could not find Hal.dll. This is not a fun message to receive. However this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330184 cleared the problem right up.

Windows now boots fine. However, I noticed while in Windows that there is no boot ini file. Sure enough, when I restarted, up pops the Hal.dll error again!

It appears that something during the startup is corrupting or deleting the boot.ini file. Any ideas what it could be?

I'm away to remove Kaspersky as it's also being a bit weir, but this one has me stumped!

 

[hooneeawr]

AskUpgradeService*
Internet Explorer 8 (I doubt it's the software itself but something that's being installed and used with it, look out for unusual BHO's.)

Anti virus and anti malware came up with nothing, however at one point I did remove the Ask toolbar. Coincidence that it started rebooting fine after that?

Seems to be working okay now. Phew, thought my sister was going to kill me when that Hal.dll error was coming up!