I\'m using jquery-ui Tabs and I\'m having a problem that occurs when a tab has been removed. The tab appears to be removed, along with its content div but when you take a look a
Is there a reason why you use this.$el.contents().remove() instead of this.$el.empty()?
Using this.$el.empty() in that jsFiddle of yours seemed to remedy the detached NodeList.
A few notes memory profiling:
I have found cases where jQuery seems to leek because they save the current jQuery object in .prevObject when doing some operations like calling .add(). Maybe that call to .contents() do some funky magic.