Pickle MemoryError - any ideas?

[Peter]

I have created a class that contains a list of files (contents,
binary) - so it uses a LOT of memory.

When I first pickle.dump the list it creates a 1.9GByte file on the
disk. I can load the contents back again, but when I attempt to dump
it again (with or without additions), I get the following:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "c:\Python26\Lib\pickle.py", line 1362, in dump
    Pickler(file, protocol).dump(obj)
  File "c:\Python26\Lib\pickle.py", line 224, in dump
    self.save(obj)
  File "c:\Python26\Lib\pickle.py", line 286, in save
    f(self, obj) # Call unbound method with explicit self
  File "c:\Python26\Lib\pickle.py", line 600, in save_list
    self._batch_appends(iter(obj))
  File "c:\Python26\Lib\pickle.py", line 615, in _batch_appends
    save(x)
  File "c:\Python26\Lib\pickle.py", line 286, in save
    f(self, obj) # Call unbound method with explicit self
  File "c:\Python26\Lib\pickle.py", line 488, in save_string
    self.write(STRING + repr(obj) + '\n')
MemoryError

I get this error either attempting to dump the entire list or dumping
it in "segments" i.e. the list is 2229 elements long, so from the
command line I attempted using pickle to dump individual parts of the
list into into files i.e. every 500 elements were saved to their own
file - but I still get the same error.

I used the following sequence when attempting to dump the list in
segments - X and Y were 500 element indexes apart, the sequence fails
on [1000:1500]:

f = open('archive-1', 'wb', 2)
pickle.dump(mylist[X:Y], f)
f.close()

I am assuming that available memory has been exhausted, so I tried
"waiting" between dumps in the hopes that garbage collection might
free some memory - but that doesn't help at all.

In summary:

1. The list gets originally created from various sources
2. the list can be dumped successfully
3. the program restarts and successfully loads the list
4. the list can not be (re) dumped without getting a MemoryError

This seems like a bug in pickle?

Any ideas (other than the obvious - don't save all of these files
contents into a list! Although that is the only "answer" I can see at
the moment :-)).

Thanks
Peter