Thanks Lykurg. Unfortunately I am not sure if I can post the exact code here... but there were repeated invocations of setSourceModel() function each time with a new heap based model object [each one created with out a parent specified] and the existing model object (set in the previous invocation of that function) is not cleaned up anywhere. Even Valgrind reported that as leak, but I just wanted to know if I was missing something. Looks like it is a valid leak and I should delete those objects explicitly.