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Martin is right: I need to retract part of my bug-report: I
just remembered that any classes that have a __del__ method
aren't automatically cleaned  by a gc.collect().  I
triggered a pseudo-Heisenbug during my testing.

After removing the __del__ method from my test class and by
using parseString() instead of feed(), I've verified that
the XML parsing isn't the source of my memory leak.  (Test
file test_memory_leak_2.py included.)

However, after further investigation, I did find the true
source of my problems.. in MySQLdb:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=536624&group_id=22307&atid=374932

Thank you again for looking into this.