Our project is almost done! OMG 1.5 years. Loving NGUI every day of it. Ok enough compliments. We are in the memory\performance tuning point of this sucker.
If i run on device(even on windows it does this) I can detect orphaned game objects in the scene. The number of them grows consistantly, after just 2 level changes I had 44 of them. They do not go away on a scene change. I went back to a "rest" scene that is mostly empty and printed out debug info on them. Here is what I was able to get. I was able to find these using the unity profiler, taking a memory snapshot and looking in the GameObjects section of Scene Memory, there it lists them all as being named "New Game Object"
I am setting their name so I can tell them apart, then printing their children, parent and components.
DEBUG: Named Him:Found:44, active=True parent = null child count = 0 children = components=,Found:44-UIDrawCall
You can see here that its a root game object who has a component inside of him that appears to be himself?

That's really strange... The type was UIDrawCall
The code I used to find this is:
GameObject[] gos = Resources.FindObjectsOfTypeAll<GameObject>();
public void DescribeGameObject(GameObject go, int count)
{
go.name = "Found:" + count;
string childrenNames = "";
for (int i = 0; i < go.transform.childCount; i++)
{
childrenNames = childrenNames + "," + go.transform.GetChild(i).gameObject.name;
}
string componentNames = "";
foreach (Component c in go.GetComponents<MonoBehaviour>())
{
componentNames = componentNames + "," + c.name+"-"+c.GetType().Name;
}
Utils.DebugLog("Named Him:"+go.name+", active=" + go.activeInHierarchy + " parent = "+((go.transform.parent == null) ?"null":go.transform.parent.name)+" child count = " + go.transform.childCount + " children =" + childrenNames + " components=" + componentNames);
}
If this is already fixed, I apologize. I am somewhat up to date, my NGUI version is 3.8. This seems like a pretty serious issue as in only 3 levels I had 44, and just a few minutes of the game running. Imagine if it ran for an hour....