It's my understanding that, inside any object's method code, RELEASE THIS releases the object unconditionally. Hence, all my base classes have a Release method does does nothing but RELEASE THIS.

I'm sure you're aware of the reason for the behavior you describe. Memory management can be difficult in OOP, because of all the little objects floating around. In general, though, you don't have to concern yourself with memory leaks in VFP the way you'd have to in C++, e.g.