Mmm, i am not sure of anything, but i think changing these settings can do 2 posibilites: game runs much better or much worse, save a backup of this and try changing, i suppose raising the min and max memory of your system, the max you can let it use for itself (if you have enough), this should do the game having more stuff in memory so the swaps between memory and disk decrease, for myself, sometimes, specially when another process in my win xp begins, i can hear the disk processing, too much work.
Well, i have a Gforce 8, that frees the cpu from some work as this have its own memory (a little), and a good graphical card have a huge impact in performance and quality, but a win xp with 2GB and any decent no blacklisted graphic card should do fine.
Having 2 GB should never be an issue, i can play most 3D high quality graphics games with good resolution with my xp and 2GB, so UO should fly, having these... graphics, i had read that some players have Vista, nobody wants Vista (all big corporations are going to upgrade from Xp to 7), and Vista also eats ram, 2G only for a decent performance of this OS, win xp runs ok with 1 gb, so UO have almos 1G only for him, it should run better than ok.
Much Housing absolutly slows the client, at least 1 time, once loaded it runs a little better, but its the worst part i have seen.
Bandwidth: looks like it need more also, i had played KR with a peer2peer client downloading, this is imposible with EC, lot of lag, this client is not efficient in any way, currently.
I recomend close all programs (specially cpu eaters like antivirus), downloaders, tune up settings in graphic uo menu, decrease resolution if you have too much, tune up your system (everything, use a third free program, there is a lot that make that work for you), defrag, etc... it should help.
regards