Jim,

I disagree that my approach is taking advantage of an undocumented feature or behavior. My application object has a GetHook method. The mehtod is called to get a reference to a ultility object (of which there may be many different ones). The emthod first checks to see if the object requested exists already and if it does it returns a reference to it, if not it creates one and returns the reference.

The caller may be storing its reference in a property or a variable. This can and does (by design) create situations where multiple objects each have a reference to the same utility object. If one of those objects decides to clean up its memory and release the variable that references the utility object, with your porposed change, all other objects using that utility object would be suseptable to crashing because the utility object disappears.

The application object never releases the utility object until system shut down because some other object may request it. IOW, the application object pools references to the utility objects so they are created once and used many times.

It just does not make sense that releasing one variable should have any effect on other variables.

The release method is another question altogether. Although I believe that dangling references are usually because the developer forgot something.