From
http://www.shacknews.com HALF LIFE 2 NEARING GOLD
"Well the rumors are swirling that Half-Life 2 is just about
done. As you guys know we carried a story a little while ago mentioning that Valve was submitting release candidates to Vivendi doing their final bughunting. Word has it that Valve has submitted RC5 recently addressing just a couple of bugs. Assuming those are fixed and nothing more is found in further testing we could be looking at a gold announcement in the very near future. The guys at CSNation, HL2Fallout, and even the former GoneGold guy are all saying this.
This is of course assuming VU doesnt hold the game up in court. But given the last couple of glimpses we've had of VU's financial situation they probably arent very eager to do that."