In view of the foregoing, the present invention provides a method and system for improving the operating system to provide benefits to a variety of database management applications and network administration by facilitating deletion of references to published objects that have become unusable, i.e., orphaned. This is enabled by implementing, preferably as part of the operating system, in a separate thread, a module that uses a set of presumptions to detect orphaned objects that can be deleted. Upon detection of suitable orphaned objects the module deletes the orphaned object from the set published objects. This strategy reduces the avoidable overhead associated with publishing objects while improving the performance and stability of the system for longer time periods.