> how do you know

Here is the story, sorry I skipped it before- I was at work then. 

I was doing the basic build-from-source on RHEL (Centos) Linux, because
I don't have root and I need to install it in $HOME/something.  I don't
try to change anything except the install location.  See the ./configure
command given before. 

I tried 2.5.2 because it was the latest + greatest.  When I ran "make
test",  it ran OK until it got to "test_list".  Then it got stuck until
I killed it.  Its very repeatable.  In another window, "top" shows the
python process's memory growing and growing, until it owns basically all
available memory (8GB) after less than a minute or so.  

Then I tried python 2.5.1, built exactly the same way, and make test
works OK- test_list completes in seconds.