The suggestion I'd make on handling parties that use an abnormal amount of consumables is the one of staying true to what little rules we do have: hand out an appropriate amount of treasure, and let the players decide how to apply it. If they spend lots of gold on consumables, they end up with fewer permanent magic items. If they spend little... well, they'll have more shinies. In other words, I do not suggest enforcing WBL on characters that already exist - and there is no rules premise for doing so, as far as I can tell. What you should be focusing on is handing out the correct amount of treasure.
Starwed's answer contains information on how much gold the game assumes characters will collect throughout their adventuring career.
Your greatest assets when it comes to determining appropriate treasure are the Treasure from Encounters table on page 54 of the Dungeon Master's guide, and the Character Wealth by Level guideline (WBL) on page 135 of the same book. In theory, random treasure generation should have the PCs end up with something in line with those guidelines, but if you are assigning treasure manually, you will have to do that balancing act by hand. If the player characters are significantly "beneath WBL", hand out more treasures. If they are "above WBL", cut back for a while.
Integrating this kind of balancing work into your campaign is tricky. For example, fighting animals for an extended period is going to leave your players poor, fighting NPCs is going to leave them decked out with bling. Getting around this problem without artificially altering the kind of opponents you're churning out can require some creativity, but stock solutions include things like valuable pelts for animals and cursed (keyed to certain races or characters) items for NPCs. And, of course, there's nothing much wrong with straying a bit off the WBL-path for a while, if you know it will eventually be corrected.
As for what specific items to hand out first - that depends vastly on your group. In most cases, I'd start with handing out cheap, generally useful tools that make a huge difference for low level parties. Healing Belts (Magic Item Compendium), partially used wands of Lesser Vigor (Spell Compendium), Anklets of Translocation (Magic Item Compendium), and so on. The Magic Item Compendium in general is a really good source of items like this. Aside from that, just start pouring in the magic weapons and ability score boosters when
- It's appropriate according to the encounters
- When the characters seem to need them.
On a final note, the Magic Item Compendium includes a system of "item levels" that were designed to speed up magic item assignment. You may want to look at it, see if you find it useful.
Best Answer
OK, decided to look into this.
There are no nice, neat tables that I can find. That said, the actual information does appear to be available, excepting for the Wu Jen.
Complete Adventurer is the most straight-forward: it’s included in each class’s entry as Starting Gold.
Complete Warrior neglected starting wealth entirely, but it’s included in the official Errata. Since the Errata is free, I think it’s safe to reproduce that here:
It’s always a good idea to check the Errata. Wizards has made some hilarious mistakes (my favorite is when they neglected to include any DCs at all in Tome of Magic for an entire type of Truenaming check), so the Errata is good to know.
For Complete Arcane, I can’t find any direct note of the starting wealth, and it doesn’t appear to be in the Errata. However, the Warlock and Warmage “Starting Packages” each have starting money in addition to equipment. I believe the rule is, you take the Starting Package’s starting money after items, and multiply it by 10. The Wu Jen doesn’t have a Starting Package that I can see, however.
Complete Divine is like Complete Arcane, but all of the classes have a Starting Package.
Weird Page on Wizards’ Website
I just found this page, which, among other things, has this:
(omitted: some asterisks indicating some details relevant only to the “Mark of Heroes” campaign)
Since for this “Mark of Heroes” campaign, everyone gets maximum gold, 200 gp seems to be 5d4×10 gp, 160 gp is 4d4×10 gp, and 120 gp is 3d4×10 gp.
Maybe that seems “more official” but since this page is for some weird product (cards to “unlock” races and classes?) that I’ve never heard of, I’m not sure what to make of it.