Problems with dynamic loading on Debian

[Craig E Rasmussen]

I've run into problem loading modules on Debian (libc-2.2.2).

I first load module A.so (using the command "from A import *").
Note that library A.so contains the symbol _XXX.  But when I
subsequently load module B.so (using the command "from B import *")
I get an ImportError: ./B.so undefined symbol: _XXX.  To make
things perfectly clear, the dynamic loader has already seen _XXX
as it was loaded from A.so.  So I don't see why the ImportError
occurs.

I've not seen this problem before.  The usage outlined above works fine
on Mac OS X and on RedHat versions older than 7.2 (I won't have access to
7.2 for a week or so).  A colleague thinks that I might indeed have the
same problem on RedHat 7.2 as he says the dynamic loader is broken in
new linux versions.

Has anyone seen this problem?  Can anyone suggest a solution?  I've tried
building python from scratch so that I know that I'm using the same 
compiler versions
for everything but this didn't help.

Thanks,
Craig