"Memory exhausted" errors after importing 17K pages

Greetings,

I’ve just imported 17K static pages (I know) into a relatively new client site and now I’m getting an error when I access the “Pages” section from the dashboard:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 89 bytes) in /home/prayatw/public_html/wp/wp-includes/meta.php on line 567

As you can see, I already have 256M assigned and the host won’t allow me to go to 512MB. Is there a way to circumvent WP from going through all the pages when I access “Pages” in the dashboard?

I have disabled/deleted all plugins and I’m using the 2011 Theme.