Re:

> I am a Postgres developer, and if you don't want to take my word for it,
> read the source code.  src/interfaces/libpq/fe-exec.c sez:

Hi -- sorry, I didn't realize you were, and it was entirely my mistake
about what the libpq functions did.

In the end, my problem was mixing code compiled with -fPIC and code
complied without it.  That seemed to generate a memory leak in code which
was actually disconnected from Postgres.  However, diagnosing it turned
out to be very difficult given that the code itself was fine, and after
some tests I incorrectly came to the conclusion about what PQgetvalue()
returned.  (I still don't know why I didn't get core dumps, but probably
what happened was that my test didn't try to free as much as I had thought
it did.)

Thanks,

-Rob