I'm sorry... This has been discussed in the newsgroup before but
never made it to the FAQ. There's a bug in the reference counting
logic of ternary pow() which is only tripped by very picky mallocs,
like the GNU malloc on Linux. This has been fixed in 1.2 beta, now on
ftp.cwi.nl in pub/guido.
--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <mailto:Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl>
<http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Guido.van.Rossum.html>