w3m freezes / 99% cpu?

[John Owens <john_owens@xxxxxxxxx>]

Howdy, I'm using w3m 0.5.2 on OS X (10.4), installed via MacPorts. I
use w3m in Carbon Emacs (summer build) in the Wanderlust mailer.
This has been pretty successful. Here's my setup:

(setq browse-url-browser-function
      '(("^http:" . browse-url-generic)
	("^mailto:"; lambda (url &rest stuff) (compose-mail (substring to 7)))
	("^file:.*\\.html?$" . w3m-browse-url))
      )

I also :

      (require 'w3m-load)
      (require 'mime-w3m)

where those files are in the site-lisp directory for my emacs
distribution (carbon-emacs). I'm fairly sure it's a new version
of emacs-w3m, but I can't tell by looking at, say, w3m.el.

However, pretty frequently recently I have dropped into a message that
needs to render via w3m, and w3m soars to 99% of the CPU and never
stops. The message never successfully renders. I have no idea how to
debug this and hope I might get some tips?

JDO