I have done a nice simple test file (see end of post) when I run this
against my test HTML page using Windows XP I can watch the amount of
memory go up by about 2,000 K for each page loaded. So I load this in
IDLE:

13,584K
run the python
30,548K
run the python
45,608K
run the python
60,515K

So there is my proof. I can't see that it is anything apart from BS
that is leaking. How can I find the leaks and more importantly, if I
do find the leaks will anyone apply the patches?

Here is the test code:

import sys

if __name__ == "__main__":
        # hack to get beautiful soup imported
        sys.path.append("C:\\py")

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
from BeautifulSoup import NavigableString
import urllib2

url = 'http://dev/mem-1.html'

def soup(html):
        soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

        for css in soup('link'):
                found = False
                for c in css.attrs:
                        if c[0]=='rel' and c[1]=='stylesheet':
                                found = True
                if found:
                        print 'css: '+str( css )

def go(url):
        request = urllib2.Request(url)
        request.add_header( 'Accept', 'text/html' )
        opener = urllib2.build_opener()
        f = opener.open(request)
        soup(f.read())
        del f

for x in range(15):
        print x
        go(url)