When disconnect (and thus connect, too) is called on a controller, the Controller's stop() routine is called before the reference is deleted. In most cases that does nothing, and the deallocation clears things up.

In some cases, the actor needs to be more careful. If there is any chance that a controller can fail to release some hardware resource or fail to be freed it can be hard to recover. Among other things there is no longer any reference to the python object, so you cannot hit it harder later. You have to make sure it is closed up before deleting the reference.

This ticket specifically applies to the fee and fpga/ccd controllers in ics_ccdActor. But actually might apply to all actors which hold hardware controllers. Please think it over, arnaud.lefur