To answer Chris' earlier question: No threads, no gui, no events. The "parser" module is the only builtin module (apart from the obvious - ntpath etc) Greg and/or Bill can correct me if I am wrong - it is just P2C, and it is just console based, mainline procedural code. It _is_ highly recursive tho (and I believe this will turn out to be the key factor in the crash)
Somewhere is a real bug, probably the one which I was seeking many time before, when I got weird crashes in the small block heap of Windows. It was never solved, and never clear if it was Python or Windows memory management.
I am confident that this problem was my fault, in that I was releasing a different version of the MFC DLLs than I had actually built with. At least everyone with a test case couldnt repro it after the DLL update. This new crash is so predictable and always with the same data that I seriously doubt the problem is in any way related.
Maybe we just found another entrance to this. It smells so very familiar: many many small tuples and we crash.
Lists this time, but I take your point. Ive got a busy next few days, so it is still exists after that I will put some more effort into it. Mark.