i installed slackware without dbus & hal, i noticed it broke xfce & a few applications, it was not big deal to rebuild xfce & the qpplications without dbus & hal, but i dont see the error your getting since i rebuilt xfce,
http://www.xfce.org/download/ get the graphical installer, it is basically all the source code packages bundled in to one large .run binary so it unpacks the source and loads a graphical tool to make it easier to build all packages in the correct order, dbus & hal are optional dependencies unless xfce was built with dbus & hal already installed then xfce wont run without dbus & hal...
the other applications i seen that needed to rebuild were CUPS and the Gimp & sane/xsane, there could be others i have not tried yet...