I have this on Feisty sometimes. I think it's a race between hal/dbus initializing and gnome desktop loading (apps that required dbus). When I'm logged in to Gnome session and get the "Failed to initalize HAL" error, I switch to tty1 and see that hal/dbus is still in middle of its initialization-phase. Thanks to upstart and parallel start-up of init scripts, my Ubuntu boots too fast for hal/dbus.
-- Failed to initalize HAL. https://launchpad.net/bugs/25931 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs