[hawghead]

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

[peterh]

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

[Wilhelmus]

One how to use repair installation: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

[ScinteX]

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