Window Refuses To Close In OSX/Safari 3.1?

got an one that might prove interesting. I have a window that refuses to close in OSX/Safari 3.1 if it has any history.

Details:

I have an embedded flash app that offers links. These links will initiate a new window. I have little access to the working of the links, so I am assuming that they are using window.open and call the popup page.

So once the window is open, I have a link within that window to close it using an a tag that fires a js function which in turn uses self.close(); See code below. This works well in all cases. The problem comes into play under the following conditions:

1) Mac/Safari 3.1 (note that XP/Safari 3.1 does NOT produce the same issue)

2) Once the window is open, the user clicks a 2nd link from the Flash app, showing the selected html page and adding history to the popup window.

3) The user then tries to close the window, which now fails.

4) Any additional addition to the popups history yields the same results (as one might imagine).

I tried to use javascript to navigate back to the initial history point, and then run self.close. This sort of worked as I would revert back in the history stack with the first click, then the window would close on the second call to the close function. But I couldn't get it to work in one click. I did notice that adding an alert between the history rollback and the self.close() actually allowed this idea to work. So I tried a setTimeout, but did not have success. Seems like there's something there, but I guess I don't understand well enough to come up with the solution.

Code:
function self_close(){
self.close();
}

HTML Code:
<a href="#" onclick='javascript:self_close();return false;'>close</a>