Mulitple XREF's Much?

Working with some really cool architectural prints. But I keep running into delays when trying to just get a clean copy of just a portion of a floor plan. This file of one of the floors has 32 XREF's attached to it. So I start examining the list the XREF's and they contain are recursive, calling itself from within itself, or at least that what appears to be happening.

Okay a little more research and a shot of bourbon, here's what I can confirm. There is an XREF in this drawing file called 1sob.dwg. So I open up 1sob.dwg and examine it and it's got the items I'm interested in but they too are in an XREF. What XREF? The very same file that I originally opened. So inside of this file is an XREF, that has an XREF in it, that has an XREF in it which points to the same original file in this chain. I'm having some trouble following this logic.

I didn't think it was possible to have circular references with xrefs, but then again, there are a lot of things I didn't think were possible but people figure out a way to do it anyway. Some of the files I receive make me wonder, how did this person get hired?

By the way, that's a pretty funny drawing title. 1sob.dwg

Ncopy is your friend.

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Yo dawg, I heard you like external references....

AutoCAD will not let you insert a drawing into itself (call that a 0-level reference) or into a drawing it references (call that a 1-level reference). From 2-level on up, I believe, is allowed. Which is what's happening here.

On another note. I use http://cadtips.cadalyst.com/sites/default/files/nodes/2017/2459/comment/LayerQuellPick.lsp extensively when dealing with nested XREFs.