critical error when setting team - malloc(): unsorted double linked list corrupted

[James Stewart Miller]

I'm getting the error 'malloc(): unsorted double linked list corrupted' when setting the team using the following code...
self._lp_team = self._launchpad.people[team]
where the team is not a valid team, or when using the following code:
self._lp_team = self._launchpad.people.findTeam(text=team)[0]
in any case, either a correct team name or incorrect.

In addition, I get the following error when using the following code:
name_list = self._launchpad.people.findTeam(text="team")
at this point, an exception is thrown with the following text:

[SSL: WRONG_VERSION_NUMBER] wrong version number (_ssl.c:2488)

I have created a new venv, this time, not importing the global site-packages and tested and I get the same error.
I will test on a separate machine in the next half an hour or so, in case it is a memory issue with this machine, but I don't think it will be. Initial search on google suggests a corrupted stack/heap.

I'm using python 3.7 with the following packages installed...
requests
httplib2
launchpadlib
beautifulsoup4
lxml
configobj
dogpile.cache
pyqt5
python-levenshtein
fuzzywuzzy
.... these are in the venv
python3-dnf - linked to the global site package since it is not available on pypi...

Many thanks...