I can tell you exactly how this worked and why it got the attention of a patch. I had discovered this on Great Lakes, not sure if anyone else came across it though.Locked-Down Items - The May 11, 2000 patch notes state: "It is no longer possible to lock down items on the steps of other players' houses." This is evidence for the notion that it may have been possible to lock items down on the steps of other players' houses prior to this patch.
The bug was introduced when they changed the "lock down" rules so that items dropped into a container were also locked down, and counted against your lockdown limit.
Step 1: Fill a "lock down" container in a house you own to its weight and/or item limit.
Step 2: Grab a table, and place it in a house you do not own.
Step 3: Pick up the table with your mouse (DO NOT LET GO!), and run back to your house, use your open door macro to open the door without "dropping" the item, and drop it into the maxed container from step 1.
This is where the magic happened.
For anyone that's tried to relocate items to a place where it couldn't fit, you know that it "rubber bands" back to the original location.
The table that you dropped into the chest would pass the "lock down" check (happened before checking if placement was valid), resulting in it being flagged with "locked down" but it would fail the placement check and warp back to where you picked it up. The combination of this resulted in it warping back while still locked down.
So, the table is now locked down in someone else's house, but by you. The owner of the other house was still able to unlock it down, sadly (but it adjusted your home's counts). This also worked in the open, but it would decay and the lock down counts wouldn't be fixed until the server restarted.
In the end, I was able to place tables on every open space in someone's house, even the doorway and all three steps (it was small vendor house). I then waited outside with my PK character and assassinated the owner when he was automatically ejected from his own home due to no valid tiles. He couldn't even get on his doorsteps to run the "I wish to release this" command. An added bonus was that this happened when the house-item loading feature was implemented, so he couldn't even see the tables on his steps.
It took a GM to fix everything, and I woke up the next morning with a 48 hour ban. Not long after that, it was patched.
In retrospect it was mean, but it was still totally worth it.