Android :: Out Of Memory / Orientation Change / Memory Analyzer Question

My application is designed to support both portrait and landscape orientations. Using my HTC IO device, it survives 12 orientation changes before throwing an out of memory exception while inflating my activity.When I follow the recommended procedure of using DDMS to first force a GC and then write a heap dump, and then load it into the Eclipse Memory Analyzer, there is only one retained instance of my application, as there should be. None of the other retained objects are obvious offenders. Just for yuks, I reran the test, and did everything the same way except I didn't force a GC. In this case I see 13 instances of my application, which is more consistent with throwing an OOM exception. Is this telling me something useful? If forcing a GC with DDMS reclaims the memory used by now-defunct instances of my activity, I would have thought the VM would have garbage collected some, if not all of these defunct activities automatically. Do I need to request GC at the very beginning of my activity lifecycle to make sure?