Cannot login to Windows XP after repair

There was some corrupt or missing hal.dll issue with XP desktop. I tried many things to solve this issue but nothing worked. So I had to load XP using its disk on a different drive F: and copied the missing files to C: drive. After that I ran the repair option from the same XP disk on the C: drive windows installation. The repair completed and Windows started with displaying the login page, but when I was trying to login then it told me that I need to activate the software. So I activated it over the phone and it seems like it had worked but when logging in using user account screen it says "loading personal settings" and screen flashes and then screen says "saving personal settings" and I am back to the XP login screen again. Even in safe mode I am getting the same problem. So does anyone know how to solve this problem? Thanks.

You can install the Recovery Console on your computer to make it available in case that you cannot restart Windows. You can then select the Recovery Console option from the list of available operating systems during startup. Follow the steps here - http://support.microsoft.com/?id=307654

Thanks for the help, I tried your method and it didnt help. The user file was actually named USERINI.EXE. So I renamed it to Uuserinit.exe and restarted but was getting the same issue. I have tried copying it to wsaupdater.exe but still there was no change. Any other ideas? Thanks.