My curiosity has the best of me with this one, what use does an intentional leak have?
Not causing a crash, because the object can only be destroyed at global scope, but then there's no guaratee that everybody likes that (global exit is a mess, nobody knows the order of destruction of global objects) -- sometimes causing random crashes.
Well, I know it's a bit ugly, it was more a quick and dirty fix than a clean solution. The clean fix is in SFML 2.