Applescript Image Events appears to have memory leak (or I don't know what I am doing)

Question

Using Image Events to create images and thumbnails for a website. The following code results in very large memory leaks in Image Event process. I have documented results of test runs in the comments.
The leak (or poor coding on my part) results in a total system halt if I attempt to process more than about 400 images at a time. Basically, I run out ot physical memory. I am running a new model 13" MBP with 8GM RAM.  I have to manually stop Image Events to reclaim the memory (or reboot of course).
Any help/suggestions would be appreciated.
(* test memory leak in Image Events *)
          tests with 58 photos selected in iPhoto
          5.7 MB left in Image Events after run with only open and close
          22.0 MB left in Image Events after run with open, save and close
          45.9 MB left in Image Events after run with open, scale, save and close
          A run with 382 photos selected used OVER 3.8 GB (gigabytes) and the
          mac ran out of physical memory so I had to stop the test.
tell application "Finder"
          set imageFolder to folder "test" of home as alias
end tell
tell application "iPhoto"
          set currPhotoList to the selection
          repeat with currPhoto in currPhotoList
                    log name of currPhoto as string
                    set theImagePath to image path of currPhoto
                    tell application "Image Events"
  launch
                              set theImage to open theImagePath
  scale theImage to size 128
  save theImage in imageFolder as JPEG with icon
  close theImage
                    end tell
          end repeat
end tell
--- end of code example

Answer 1

Does the following code do any difference? Most likely no I guess… but better try than nothing.
tell application "Finder"
    set imageFolder to folder "test" of home as text -- instead of “as alias” (see theTargetPath below)
end tell
set theImagePaths to {}
set theImagePathsRef to a reference to theImagePaths -- faster with big lists
tell application "iPhoto"
    set currPhotoList to the selection
    repeat with currPhoto in currPhotoList
        log name of currPhoto as string
        get POSIX file (image path of currPhoto) as alias -- faster ?
        copy result to the end of theImagePathsRef
    end repeat
end tell
tell application "Image Events"
    launch
    repeat with theImagePath in theImagePaths
        set theImage to open theImagePath
        scale theImage to size 128
        set theTargetPath to (imageFolder & name of theImagePath)
        save theImage in theTargetPath as JPEG with icon
        close theImage
    end repeat
end tell