Jeff has tried many times over two years to produce the originally reported bug without success. By code inspection, I cannot see how a request handler exception could cause a leak. Therefore I am closing this as “works for me”.

Working backwards from all the spurious version changes (I wish people wouldn’t do that!), I figure that this was originally opened against Python 2.4 only. It is possible that the bug got fixed in the meantime.

For the question of coping with exceptions from handle_error(), the change proposed in Issue 25139 should cover that.