Segfault on merge with 1.6.2.1

Greetings.

I'm trying to figure out what's going on with a merge I'm trying to do. As far as I know, it's a fairly standard situation, just merging two branches. But I get a segfault each time. This occurs with 1.5.6.5 and 1.6.2.1. The earlier version is on a Debian Etch box with backports.debian.org. The latter is Debian Sid. I also tried on a Windows box with MSysGit 1.6.2.1-preview20090322.exe.

The 1.6.2.1 version just segfaults, but 1.5.6.5 says:

/usr/bin/git-merge: line 438: 32335 Segmentation fault git-merge-$strategy $common -- "$head_arg" "$@" Merge with strategy recursive failed.

In all cases, .git/index.lock is left behind.

I'm using the default configuration, with only a few basic options in my person .gitconfig.

Unfortunately, I cannot post the archive, but I can tar the archive and share that with individuals, if need be.

The problems started with a weird merge by another developer a while ago that somehow reapplied earlier commits. It looked like he had done some commits that wiped some earlier commits but then a commit or two latter the old commits were added back. When I tried to merge the resulting master into my working branch it segfaulted. I didn't have time (or the immediate need) to look into it then and it's been forgotten until now (when, of course, it needs to be done in the next few days :( ).

I have run git gc and also pruned a couple of minor dangling objects. Running git fsck --full reveals no problems. The largest file is about 6MiB.

I've asked on #git, and drizzd there suggested I try here. At this point I'm completely at a loss.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Michael