Linux-related help

[Susan Williams]

Howdy, y'all,

[No one will remember me, but I'm back after a long
absense because--you guessed it--I have a problem and
I want some help...]

We are attempting to port from Solaris to Linux, and
I'm having some unpleasant malloc/free problems at
exit (sys.exit).  We have running software based
currently on 1.5.2.  We're compiling on Linux with gcc
3.0.3 (on Solaris we were using Sun's compiler, not
gcc, I think).

Unfortunately I have a 3rd party module I'm linking with 
python that is rather ancient.  We first got it when using
python 1.3, we "ported" it to 1.5.2, and I can't quite
pin down whether it is the root of the problem or not,
perhaps it is doing something not quite kosher.
(The idea of trying to get it running with 2.1 gives
me the willies, but that is not really today's issue.)

Anyone out there using Linux especially with 1.5.2
is this ringing any bells?  On exit, python is clearing
the list of modules, each module is clearing dictionary
entries by setting them to None, and it is the decref
that is blowing up.  It is not always in the same place,
but it is always in the code that is setting a dictionary
value to None and deleting whatever was there before.

Any ideas welcome.  I'm not too well versed on either the
innards of python or the proper coding for module
extensions.

thanks...
sue williams