Hi Michael,
Well, I think maybe. During the loop ajax request must be sent to the server back and forth. If I knew what’s in the response of those requests, I might be able to tell what the problem is.
To check the ajax responses, hit F12 on your browser to open up the development tools and navigate to the network panel and click the XHR button, it should look like this (I am using Chrome for this): https://i.imgur.com/auuF09v.png
This will filter ajax requests sent and recieved from the server. Now, with the tools open, refresh the page and do the search with the looping issue, and each loop you should see a request appear in the list as admin-ajax.php (or ajax_search.php), like so: https://i.imgur.com/nndd7yn.png
Stop the issue, so that the requests stop as well (navigating back one page on the results list), and click on one of the last requests that was created by the loop. Some new tabs will appear, and click on the Response panel: https://i.imgur.com/wk4Ym9O.png
The text/HTML you see on that panel is what I need, please copy & paste that into a text file. You can do the same thing for some of the other requests generated by the loop as well (just put them to separate files). One request should be sufficitent though.