Hello,

I'm having a garbage collection issue, and the only thing holding a reference to the object I want to collect is RibbonTabItem. Hoping someone can provide some insight to point me in the right direction.

Some quick background: The application I'm working on uses a RibbonWindow. The main content area is bound to a CurrentActivityWorkspace property. Most buttons in the ribbon above the content area cause the CurrentActivityWorkspace property to be set to a particular view-model. DataTemplates then allow WPF to render the view (UserControl) for that view-model. I also have a mechanism in place to assocate the UserControl with a particular context-specific RibbonTabItem and add to RibbonMenu.ContextualTabGroups at the same time. The issue I'm having is that, according to ANTS memory profiler, my UserControl is not being garbage collected after I close it.

There were several objects maintaining strong references to my UserControl, and I have been able to eliminate all of them except for one. This last reference is coming from Infragistics.Windows.Ribbon.RibbonTabItem._effectiveValues. I think if I can eliminate this last strong reference, my UserControl will be collected by the GC.

I don't see any direct references from my RibbonTabItem XAML to my UserControl. It's being given some Resources and some RibbonGroups. Each RibbonGroup has some ButtonTools which are bound to ICommands. When the ICommand is executed, CurrentActivityWorkspace is set.

As a test, I added code that calls RibbonMenu.Tabs.Clear() and RibbonMenu.ContextualTabGroups.Clear() before taking my memory snapshot. The strong reference remains.

So my two questions are:

1. Can you think of a reason why RibbonTabItem's private _effectiveValues field might be referencing my UserControl? 
2. Can you think of a reason why the RibbonTabItem is even in memory anymore, now that I've cleared the tabs out of the ribbon?

Regarding #2, I came across an interesting discussion in the xamChart forum: http://forums.infragistics.com/forums/p/9722/243091.aspx#243091. The reference chain in that post includes ResourceDictionary._ownerFEs, and that issue was apparently resolved in an update to the xamChart. Similarly, every reference chain I see pointing to my RibbonTabItem also includes ResourceDictionary._ownerFEs. Perhaps there's a problem somewhere in my ResourceDictionaries?

Thanks!

-Andrew