Sidebox category_tree breaks on large category

Has any one experienced the side box category_tree breaking when a large count category is processed? No errors displayed, just a blank page (category and main column). Using PHP 5.2.1 and mySQL 5.0.77. There are 30 categories, 39K plus products. The problem category has 22K plus products, 76 sub categories, 17 inactive. When I try to activate a sub-category, the display page for the main category breaks at the side box display. Seems to be failing
when building the category_tree, but cannot locate error. Have not located any limits that would cause this. Any ideas on what may cause this?

I am surprised there is only one (old) post on this because it's still an issue if you have a large number of categories. You may be able to fix this by increasing your memory size in your php.ini file, but ultimately a non-recursive version of the category_tree.php file would be the best solution.