I found the orginal problem when trying to send large 
email attachments on AIX 5.2. I tracked the issue down 
to the fact that a string can only grow to a very 
restricted size on AIX 5.2. bin2ascii fails at the pint the 
function tries to join the list togther to form 1 string.

I wrote the following test program to prove the issue:

a = ''
cnt = 0

while cnt < 1024:
 a = a + 'x'
 cnt += 1

c = ''
cnt = 0

while cnt < 1024:
 c = c + a
 cnt += 1

b = ''
cnt2 = 0

while 1:
   b = b + c
   cnt2 += 1
   print cnt2

On AIX 5.2 you get a MemoryError with a cnt2 value of 
42. I can run the test program on all other platforms and 
get a cnt2 value over 150 before stopping to program 
myself.

I have tried the binary python 2.2 from the IBM site and 
building python 2.3.4 myself using the gcc from the IBM 
site. Both fail with a cnt2 value of 42.

Can anyone please advise on how to get AIX 5.2 to 
allow single objects to have more memory allocated.