Found a solution: probably
the solution.
Install or reinstall ImageMagick on your server. Even if you don't use it. Be absolutely sure to run the Perl make at the end of the process. Go here for a super how-to by Anu Gupta:
Movable Type and Image::Magick - digital<?>queryAfter weeks of bashing our brains out on this, we stumbled upon
(yet another) someone else on a (weirdly) this very forum with a different way of describing exactly the same problem. Fortunately for them and us, user Yntouse posted the solution with backup from the aforelinked Anu.gupta. It was so exactly our problem that I immediately checked our test server's Apache error log for messages about "Deep recursion on subroutine "Image::Magick...." (see the second post in the thread).
We had a current ImageMagick on that server and working for other systems just fine but I went ahead and installed a slightly newer one -- being very sure to run the Perlmagick install too.
It's a lenghty compile but once it was done the MT problem was gone. Poof. Gone.
I checked the Apache error logs on our production server but (
NOTE:) I did NOT find the same error message. That was a little frustrating, I must say, but I went ahead and reinstalled Image::Magick and PerlMagick and again, like magic, the problem is GONE. Fantastic.
Many parts of MT were being affected by this. Ironically, you can't run the MT system check from the dashboard while you're experiencing this problem as your MT.cgi system will dive into the crushing ImageMagick memory eating loop of death. You can, however, safely run mt-check.cgi directly from your web browser as:
http://www.your-domain-here.com/your-path-...gi/mt-check.cgi. Run that and look to see if MT thinks that you don't have ImageMagick installed. If that's the case then this is probably the fix for you!
Good luck!
(Will post this on my blog at
ThisllWork.com too.)