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I have found the problem. Sorry for wasting your time everyone. The lists themselves were not too long. There was a freak coincidence, which caused random elements of the list to be a 10,000 deep nested sequence of lists.
 Copyright Sage, 2010. Some rights reserved under creative commons license. Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.
 
                
                Copyright Sage, 2010. Some rights reserved under creative commons license. Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.