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While Andreas's patch does indeed prevent the crash, there is something more going on here.
I modified his patch to print out the reference counts immediately after the new INCREF commands.
With the INCREF commands commented out, it looks like this:
~/devel/py3k$ ./issue113213.3
START
Try import #0 ...Initialising _pickle
Pickler type references: 10
Unpickler type references: 8
Module initialised
SUCCESS
Try import #1 ...Initialising _pickle
Pickler type references: 10
Unpickler type references: 8
Module initialised
SUCCESS
Try import #2 ...Initialising _pickle
Pickler type references: 9
Unpickler type references: 7
Module initialised
SUCCESS
Try import #3 ...Initialising _pickle
Pickler type references: 8
Unpickler type references: 6
Module initialised
SUCCESS
Try import #4 ...Initialising _pickle
Pickler type references: 7
Unpickler type references: 5
Module initialised
SUCCESS
Try import #5 ...Initialising _pickle
Pickler type references: 6
Unpickler type references: 4
Module initialised
SUCCESS
Try import #6 ...Initialising _pickle
Pickler type references: 5
Unpickler type references: 3
Module initialised
SUCCESS
Try import #7 ...Initialising _pickle
Pickler type references: 4
Unpickler type references: 2
Module initialised
SUCCESS
Try import #8 ...Initialising _pickle
Pickler type references: 3
Unpickler type references: 1
Module initialised
Segmentation fault
Note that it does the right thing the first time Py_Finalize is called, but the reference counts start going down after that.
When the INCREF is included, the count goes up initially and then levels out.
So I believe the simple patch is just masking the problem instead of fixing it. The correct answer is to follow the documentation and implement the module finalisation protocol for _pickle (i.e. move all the static globals into the module struct and implement module traversal and finalisation functions).