Steven Elkins wrote:

Since I've missed you saying you tried 'chase pointers' on some of these instances, I'll mention it. It's available in the Inspector yellow button menu.

HTH, Steve

Indeed I had tried this many times. I discovered that Magma Proxies were confusing the PointerFinder, having attempted to fix this by making the PointerFinder ignore MagmaPRoxies I continued my search and ended up in WeakRegistry!

One of my components is registered for finalisation, with its executor being a minimal copy of itself with an inst var pointing to the resource that needs to be tidied up on finalisation, which doesnt seem to be happening.

I heard rumours that Squeak finalization was not all that good, is this likely to be the problem and is there a way to give it a kick?

any ideas?

___________________________________________________________ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. "The New Version is radically easier to use" – The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html

Solved my memory problem, I had some stuff in the #finalizationRegistry, whose executors may not have been as well crafted as they needed to be thus stopping the finalization process. Having fixed these, these instances still didn't go away.

The, somewhat curious, missing piece of the puzzle was to find a way to kick off finalization.

I created a TestGC class with a method #finalize that would write to the transcript in order to see whether finalization was indeed working at all.

TestGC new finalizationRegistry add: TestGC new.

Having run this a few times, I took a look at the finalizationRegistry and to my surprise everything had gone!

My previous days looking at this problem were confused and frustrated due to MagmaMutatingProxies not being ignored by PointerFinder.

many thanks to everyone for your help.

Keith

___________________________________________________________ All new Yahoo! Mail "The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use." - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html