Sorry to disappear this afternoon but my client starting crashing too, on top of the problem of two stuck characters in Plains of Ashford. Probably some incompatible setting that resulted from deleting local.DAT.
Anyway I've been spending the past couple hours trying to get my main, Burnt Pow, back from load screen limbo. I've tried everything suggested on every thread I've been able to find, quite a few things actually! Some of it is little more than voodoo but I've done it all. At this point I'm pretty sure that there's nothing I personally can do to fix it, so I filed a ticket.
For now I'm just focused on getting the client back to a non-crashing state. Running a -repair now, next step is to delete and reinstall from scratch. I don't often play alts except for crafting, so apart from dailies I'll probably be mostly MIA while I wait for a fix from Anet.