Moving to Havok 2 was mentioned in 2003, however, it wasn't mentioned with a firm deadline. The first "date" given that I can recall was Philip saying "a few weeks after the 1.4 release." v1.4 was the release that introduced custom animations and streaming audio on parcels.

AFAIK, this won't really help with border crossings - the issue there is passing data (like attachments) from one server to another - but it should improve simulator stability in general quite a bit. I've heard quotes that between 1/3 to 1/2 of simulator crashes are caused by physics problems. Havok 4 offers some major improvements over Havok 1.

Regards,

-Flip