As we all know the IE GC is at best a-royal-piece-of-garbage (pun intended), especially when it comes to closures and event handling. By attaching javascript to an ActiveX object (any DOM element and the XMLHttpRequest object) and then referring to the object itself one runs the risk of fcking the GC.

There are several tricks that prevent (or lessen the effects) this by variable reassigning and so on, but why not circumvent that entirely? Alex Russell (Dojo fame) posted a little about it at http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/?p=528 and I think it makes sense. By observing the request rather then trying to rig it one can escape the death trap known as the IE GC.