I've got a common problem with my controllers in a complex, long-running communication application. Often a controller will have an asynchronous event waiting and, before getting resolved, the user will take an action that will destroy the controller. Inside the callback for the event there's a method called on the jQuery-wrapped element (let's say... $.fn.slideDown). So, when the callback eventually fires the element has been set to 'null' by destroy and null, of course, has no slideDown method.
One of my possible solutions is to create a new Controller class extending $.Controller in which the destroy method takes the nulled element and wraps it in jQuery. So you end up with an empty jQuery collection. That way the methods will be dropped silently by jQuery.
My question is - do you think this will introduce a memory leak?