Now that we understand the behavior, we should think about potential solutions
for awhile before making any changes. Also, the behavior is similar but it gets
*much* slower if GC is on.  I just turned off GC in my test case to make it
easier to investigate the problem because system execution finishes more 
quickly with GC off.

I suggest that any solutions that  change the current behavior be enabled
via environment variables and/or features in class MEMORY (i.e., leave the
default behavior as it is, to avoid causing problems for applications that
already work fine).