could this be caused by a virus

[bigteduk]

i have just installed a new ATI radeon 8500 128 mb graphics card into my PC the only othr change i made was too move my sound card down 1 pci slot for better cooling.
Anyway after installation everything looked to be working fine, until i re-booted after a couple of times. Windows XP then on startup started to come up with the message 'windows is unable to start the file \windows\system32\config\system the file may be corrupt or missing' or the message 'windows is unable to start the file
\windows\system32\hal.dll is missing or corrupt'
After several attempts to fix this using the recovery console i gave up and re-installed XP BUT after a couple of re-boots on the new setup with all the lastest drivers downloaded for all my hardware it did exactly the same thing again.
i have tried this one more time with the same results am and wondering if it is a virus causing it as it is my system files getting changed

Any help would be greatly appreciated as i am at my wits end

 

[xyrx]

Not sure if it's a virus.. Microsoft has a fix for it though, which makes me think that there's a corrupt system file or boot record that stays even though you re-install WinXP. Found this on Microsoft's website:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q320252

They don't seem to indicate WHY this happens, and the fix is very vague. Good luck, I guess.