🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm redrawing a simple black and white pencil drawing. 

When I do my redraws I always subtract the white areas from the black, leave just the black outline, which can then be taken into photoshop and painted over without having to magic wand the white out and potentially leaving a halo. 

Well, I've done redraws of images way more complicated than this before in versions 8 and 9, but in 10, this simple image causes memory problems after several subtractions.  I noticed that my computer had 98 percent of it's memory, then after this one subtraction, it went down to 30 some percent.  Plus, it became extremely slow and I noticed that if I save the file to restart Illustrator, the file becomes extremely huge (one meg to 164 megs) and unopenable by Illustrator. 

Does I-10 compound paths differently or or is this a bug? 

I've tried it on both the Mac and PC versions of Illustrator and the same thing happens. 

The Mac I used was a G4 with OS9 and 256 megs of memory.  64 megs were allocated to Illustrator at the time. 

The PC is an Athlon Thunderbird 1.2 GHz, with Windows XP Pro and 768 megs of memory.  At start, Illustrator reads approximately 500 megs available to it.