If it were me I would likely make sure the factory recovery partition was erased. I'd hold down CTRL-ALT while booting to the network.. run fdisk /dev/sda from the bash prompt, delete all partitions, write changes, reboot then try reimaging with your base and the addon image I pointed you to. "If" this just started happening after updating your XP base image to SP3 undoubtledly it would be a HAL issue.
I have found in the past that fdisk'ing the drive, (which doesn't disturb image safe data) will address many odd issues.
I assume you are running sysprep on your base image? And are addressing system driver issues in some manner?
