infinite recursion in pickle.load()

[Thomas]

we regularly pickle and unpickle data from the same script (mostly
dictionaries).

sometimes, a file written this way cannot be unpickled with
pickle.load(), due to an infinite recursion with __getattr__ in
codecs.py. here is a python2.5 stack trace excerpt:

/usr/local/lib/python2.5/pickle.py in load(file)
1403
1404 def load(file):
-> 1405 return Unpickler(file).load()
1406
1407 def loads(str):

/usr/local/lib/python2.5/pickle.py in load(self)
891 while 1:
892 key = read(1)
--> 893 dispatch[key](self)
894 except _Stop, stopinst:
895 return stopinst.value

/usr/local/lib/python2.5/pickle.py in load_build(self)
1248 state = stack.pop()
1249 inst = stack[-1]
-> 1250 setstate = getattr(inst, "__setstate__", None)
1251 if setstate:
1252 setstate(state)

/usr/local/lib/python2.5/codecs.py in __getattr__(self, name, getattr)
328 """ Inherit all other methods from the underlying stream.
329 """
--> 330 return getattr(self.stream, name)
331
332 def __enter__(self):

/usr/local/lib/python2.5/codecs.py in __getattr__(self, name, getattr)
328 """ Inherit all other methods from the underlying stream.
329 """
--> 330 return getattr(self.stream, name)
331
332 def __enter__(self):

...

The last frame repeats ad infinitum.

'inst' in the third frame is a <StreamWriter instance at 839b62c>

The problem is the same with cPickle.

This looks somewhat related to this Python issue, which is only about
the exception reporting:
http://bugs.python.org/issue5508
(The title of the issue is the error you get when running our code in
python2.6).

Any idea how to go about that?

T.