I also observed the following w.r.t. the problem stated earlier. I start in Mac OS X (using 'option' at start). I confirm in 'disk utility' that the data partition I made in Windows is still shown as 'free space'. So I just delete it again.
Now the Windows starts working without the error of 'hal.dll'.

There is another observation. When I used the 'gpt' command (gpt -b PARTITIONSTART -s SIZE, etc.) by booting from OS X DVD and used disk utility, there was a message saying something like 'Suspicious sector at MBR 0' (don't remember exactly). The partition of unused space seemed to have got done but this rather 'suspicious' message too was there.

Editing the boot.ini and changing 3's to 4's doesn't help. In my case '....(3)' works fine till I do not try to make an NTFS 'data' partition too.

Please help.