I have a vendor house at the Trammel Yew Crossroads near the Cemetary, that is good for a character coming back, or for general shopping.
I rarely have high-LRC pieces priced over 5k (and typically 10% or less of what equivalent pieces go for in Luna). Some of my jewelry might go a little higher, but not by much.
As for Haven, I blew it up.... Seriously....
In 2003 (IIRC; maybe 2004) I got to talking with the guys at the EA booth at Gen Con. They let me use the UO Age of Shadows demo booths they had set up to do my BOD runs, and in the process I showed them some of the truly nasty rubberbanding and other bugs with Haven on LA.
Turns out that the problems were on all the shards with Haven (though LA had it worst), and it was nearly unnoticible to the devs when playing at work or home, because they were usually connecting to internal test servers in the same building as they were in, or through a direct link to the shards over EA/Origin's connection to the net backbone. But, once they got to see what it was like from the viewpoint of someone playing over a normal connection, from elsewhere, they realized something had to be done.
They tried all the way through 2006 and early 2007 to fix it, but the problems were too ingrained with how Haven was created/coded originally, as well as the remnants of the old "newbie only" code that they didn't know where to find (due to bad/negligable commenting during the coding process).
The only workable option to fix Haven was to wipe it, and recode it from scratch. There was hints that, due to the event that was being tested in TC in Moonglow at the time (something that was supposed to have led into Stygian Abyss at the end of 2007, but that project got delayed 2 years - thank you, EA Japan (another story)), Moonglow was going to be destroyed, and made into the new player training area. HOWEVER, since Haven was having to be recoded from scratch at the time, Haven ended up as the victim (effectively giving the Devs a blank slate to work with) - and the Devs BLEW IT UP with a blackrock explosion, and New Haven appeared, supposedly dragged in from the future of a parallel shard/timeline. So, since I was the one who made the issue known, I'm responsible for it blowing up...
If you're making new characters, try the New Haven quests. Many of the skill trainers will train skills to 33-40 skill, and offer quests that give quick gains to 50 skill (either in the crafting skill areas, or combat-related skills gaining fighting the undead in the ruins of Haven). In fact, given what skills can be bought and trained that way, when making a character it's best to only put points into skills that DON'T have New Haven training quests, with maybe 1 point skill in Magery or some other spellcasting, just to get the book to start with.
(note also that the KR client allows custom characters to start with 4 skills totaling 120 points, instead of 3 skills at 100 - the SA client should do so as well, but not tested it yet. Even if you prefer the 2D client, it's worth toughing it out through the other clients during character creation for that extra bonus - once you get past the dark knight, you never have to use the new clients again).
