> Is there *any* way of getting around this?

Sure: Determine the bug, and fix it. A prerequisite
is that you have the source code of all extension modules
which you are using, but that seems to be the case.

If you want others to help you in finding the bug, you
need to provide more detail, e.g. a specific piece of
code that reproducibly wastes memory. If you want to
study how Python objects are allocated and released,
you need to create a debug build of Python (and all
extension modules), and start, e.g., with looking at the
value of sys.gettotalrefcount() over time.

HTH,
Martin