This one-liner causes IronPython console to run out of memory (2.05GB page file) and freeze Windows XP: from xml.dom import minidom This is the installation: Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600] IronPython 1.0.2216 (Beta) on .NET 2.0.50727.42 python 2.4.2 pyxml 0.8.4 pywin32 205 py2exe 0.6.3 IRONPYTHONPATH = c:\python24\lib