Thanks Tabri. Was using ProfitUI and had the issues above. Installed Darq and applied it to my monk (one of the characters with the locking/crashing problem) and lo and behold, problem solved. I suppose I'll wait for an update to Profit UI CE on my other characters (or just not go into the cities), as I prefer Profit to Darq. Ah well...
I doubt the issue was either Darq or Profit. They both use eq2map in the background and that was broken on our end. Since we fixed that both Darq and Profit should work again. Unless something else is broken there but so far haven't heared anything about that.