I've found the following workarounds:
With any merchant wait 40 seconds or so. It seems they have two inventories. Their standard one and a dynamic one. Wait for both to come up.
Exit merchant menu.
Repeat. The delay should be lessened.
If you were caught stealing wait for 1 minute and do nothing. If the game still hangs take each individual character to camp and then quick travel somewhere else.
Hopefully a hotfix will come soon but until then . . .
