Issue creating more than 4 combinations

[POOLEworks]

Putting together a new shop with PS 1.7+  I have some products that will have 4 options that I'd like to be 4 drop downs. I can do 1. I can do 2, but 4 causes a giant out of memory issue and although the 4 drop downs are created after crashing out the server with a fatal error, I can no longer edit that page without another memory issue.

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 20480 bytes)
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 147456 bytes)
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 147456 bytes) 

All of the memory errors seem to be occurring in Symfony.

The first time around my server IT guy got involved and looked over the database. Found over 10,000 duplicate entires for that product.

Anyone have a similar issue? Anyone know of a way to work around this (via phpadmin) or a module?
Thanks