Will ignoring IDisposable cause memory leaks?

Question

In the comments to an answer I wrote we had a discussion about memory leaks and IDisposable where we didn\'t come to any real conclusion.

A class that h

Answer 1

If an IDisposable object has a finalizer that de-allocates unmanaged memory then the memory will be free when the finalizer is called (after it is marked for collection by the GC and placed in the finalizer queue), but if there isn't any finalizer and Dispose() is never called, then memory can be leaked and only re-claimed when the process terminates.