I've experienced the described hang quite often in recent times, usually with home-points, but indeed, sometimes with the junk goblins as well. Not sure if it's a global network issue, or something due to the SqEX server changes, or/and my ISP being crud, but I dare say it does happen pretty often these days.

As for the suggested fix, it's not clear to me if you mean a kind of a hard timeout on a conversation with an NPC, or something with regards to the execution of it?

The former I'd understand as something along the lines of the game client "disconnecting" from the conversation, hard, after a period of time. This would probably need some really good checks for it to not "disconnect" hard at the wrong time, leading into loss of items or/and progression.

As for the player-side workaround, a less hammer-like solution I've used is suspend the process for ~1 minute, which will lead into being disconnected from the game, but only as far as to the character selection/title screen when resuming so I don't even need to log in again. I'm running on Linux though, and don't know/remember how simple that might be on other operating systems.

Sometimes that does lead into a someawhats funky state in resuming, where I can move around as normal, and everything else seems to be like normal, but interacting with /any/ NPC will lead to the hang again until I go back all the way to the PlayOnline viewer, and start the conversation with the server again (or a different server) by re-entering the game.