Why does jquery leak memory so badly?
Solution 1:
My initial thought would be that it has something to do with the way the jquery ajax method either:
a. creates circular references, especially bad for IE
b. creates properties on internal objects which cannot be deleted due to the way they have been created and the setting of the DontDelete property. See this for more info: http://perfectionkills.com/understanding-delete/
Either way, the garbage collector would be prevented from picking up the trash, which would result in a runaway memory leak, especially if that suspect function is executing frequently.