I've been building and testing a program that reads the serial port and the publishes some data off to a topic. Now in the course of checking memory leaks, I realized that just declaring a Publisher or Timer gives rise to memory leaks of the type 'possibly lost'. Here's the basic code I have. It does nothing:

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{ 
  std::string node_name = "node";
  std::string pub_type;   
  std::string init_time;
  ros::init(argc, argv,"talker");  
  ros::Timer timer2;
  ros::Publisher pubsensID;
  ros::Publisher chatter_pub[10] = {};   
  ros::NodeHandle n;
  pubsensID = n.advertise<std_msgs::String>("SensorIDs", 1000);
  std::cout<<"Publisher service started with this configuration: "<<endl;
  std::cout<<"\t#Node name:             "<< node_name <<endl;
  ros::shutdown();
  close(sd);
  return status;

}

If I comment out the lines declaring the ros::Timer and ros::Publisher I get a clean output from Valgrind. If not, then I get this: [EDIT: Reran it with -leak-check=full option as suggested by @ahendrix]

HEAP SUMMARY:
    in use at exit: 1,421 bytes in 43 blocks
  total heap usage: 2,877 allocs, 2,834 frees, 137,330 bytes allocated

16 bytes in 1 blocks are possibly lost in loss record 11 of 39
   at 0x402B9B4: operator new(unsigned int) (in /usr/lib/valgrind/vgpreload_memcheck-x86-linux.so)
   by 0x44027D3: std::string::_Rep::_S_create(unsigned int, unsigned int, std::allocator<char> const&) (in /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.0.16)
   by 0x146B003: ???

16 bytes in 1 blocks are possibly lost in loss record 12 of 39
   at 0x402B9B4: operator new(unsigned int) (in /usr/lib/valgrind/vgpreload_memcheck-x86-linux.so)
   by 0x44027D3: std::string::_Rep::_S_create(unsigned int, unsigned int, std::allocator<char> const&) (in /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.0.16)
   by 0x4404A47: char* std::string::_S_construct<char const*>(char const*, char const*, std::allocator<char> const&, std::forward_iterator_tag) (in /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.0.16)
   by 0x4404BB5: std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >::basic_string(char const*, std::allocator<char> const&) (in /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.0.16)
   by 0x474B805: log4cxx::Level::getAll() (in /usr/lib/liblog4cxx.so.10.0.0)
   by 0x474171D: log4cxx::Hierarchy::Hierarchy() (in /usr/lib/liblog4cxx.so.10.0.0)
   by 0x380170BF: ??? (in /usr/lib/valgrind/memcheck-x86-linux)

17 bytes in 1 blocks are possibly lost in loss record 13 of 39
   at 0x402B9B4: operator new(unsigned int) (in /usr/lib/valgrind/vgpreload_memcheck-x86-linux.so)
   by 0x44027D3: std::string::_Rep::_S_create(unsigned int, unsigned int, std::allocator<char> const&) (in /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.0.16)
   by 0x4404A47: char* std::string::_S_construct<char const*>(char const*, char const*, std::allocator<char> const&, std::forward_iterator_tag) (in /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.0.16)
   by 0x4404BB5: std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >::basic_string(char const*, std::allocator<char> const&) (in /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.0.16)
   by 0x474BDA5: log4cxx::Level::getInfo() (in /usr/lib/liblog4cxx.so.10.0.0)
   by 0x4641D30: __static_initialization_and_destruction_0(int, int) (in /home/mharshe/ros/core/devel/lib/librosconsole.so)
   by 0x4641F5E: _GLOBAL__sub_I_rosconsole.cpp (in /home/mharshe/ros/core/devel/lib/librosconsole.so)
   by 0x400EEAA: call_init (dl-init.c:85)
   by 0x400EF93: _dl_init (dl-init.c:134)
   by 0x400120E: ??? (in /lib/i386-linux-gnu/ld-2.15.so)

 [snip]
LEAK SUMMARY:
   definitely lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
   indirectly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
     possibly lost: 233 bytes in 11 blocks
   still reachable: 1,188 bytes in 32 blocks
        suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
Reachable blocks (those to which a pointer was found) are not shown.
To see them, rerun with: --leak-check=full --show-reachable=yes

For counts of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -v
ERROR SUMMARY: 11 errors from 11 contexts (suppressed: 0 from 0)

Should I just ignore this and deal with the rest of the errors? Or will these memory leaks come and bite me later on?