> A while back, the Modula-3 effort built a system called Network objects that

There are serious problems with NO.  Check out this instead:

	http://www-sor.inria.fr/projects/sspc/

We have implementations in Lisp, C++ (the one on the web site is stale and
should not be used), Java, Objective CAML, most of an implementation in
Smalltalk, and the beginnings of one in the Join Calculus language.

The basic mechanisms have been proved correct, and we recently added an
extension to cut (and hence collect) distributed cycles of garbage.

Ian

PS: the above is actually my "day job".  ;)