Around version 1.7 of xorg-server, hal was no longer required to start x11, or even to autodetect devices (at startup or with hotplug). For input devices, evdev takes care of most of the autodetection, and it doesn't require HAL at all. xorg now ships with a udev backend, which is part of what is making the 'getting rid of udev' part of this project so hard. The stock Slackware packages in /x/ all work fine without HAL.

Replacing wicd with wpa_supplicant is easy: you remove wicd. Correctly configured [1], wpa_supplicant can automatically associate with WPA2, WPA, WEP, and unprotected networks automatically. I have my laptop configured to run _ killall -HUP wpa_supplicant _ followed by _ dhcpcd -n wlan0 _ when it resumes from sleep. This causes wpa_supplicant to rescan and associate to any configured network, and then causes the dhcp client to attempt to renew the lease. If renewing fails, it will request a new lease.

This doesn't cover hardware ethernet at all; I rarely use that, and don't find _ ifconfig wlan0 down && dhclient eth0 _ to be too arduous to type into a terminal. There's been some discussion on the suckless.org mailing list [2] about this; I'm sure you can find it with a little searching.

[1] http://p.remotehost.co/pastes/2011-01-16T12:11:51.raw
[2] http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1012/date.html