stevenj if you go to your c: drive and then go to the nvidia folder and open it it has another folder called display drivers inside this folder it will show you what drivers in it.what driver is in this folder?

Thanks ...it is 280.26

If your dll is damaged or bugged, you could try to download a new one and replace on the windows/system32 folder. Just watch out for unreliable sites when downloading.

Provided that it is not being called from there it should be fine having one in that location. That is a specific repository for an architecture that you may not be using but it is important for Windows to have specific abstraction layers for hardware that could potentially be used. The c:\windows\winsxs directory is a catalog of information where specific CPU/Hardware types are stored for future use if necessary. 
 
If you use an application like Process Explorer you should see all the working process applications, DLL's and the like running on your system. Use the 'find' feature at the top of this application and you can search for the 'hal.dll' and see where it's being called for since Windows 7 normally does not use this any further. Doing this will show you where it is being called from and usually, if it happens to be used, it comes from the C:\windows\system32 directory. If it is being called from elsewhere it will show you that location. I would suspect any other areas that is being used to call that specific .dll file. Don't mistake the MSI Afterburner variant, RTHAL.dll as this as it's is for Riva Tuner's hardware layer to your video card. I'll show you an example of process explorer: