Okay, so I've discovered that there are memory leaks in libtar-1.2.11, and at one point I thought that I had located them... but I haven't. It seems that the project's programmer implemented his own linked list structure, and this is where the memory is getting leaked but it isn't obvious yet how to fix it.
Nope, the list looks clean. So,
Rich seems to be correct about the source for one of the memory leaks, but there is another related to the path name that I haven't found yet. This should be fun to track down.
Update: I conferred with Dr. Jonyer about the supposed memory leak. As it turns out the leaks program only thinks there is a memory leak. The memory in question is on the stack not the heap. This is true, at least, for the 'leak' that Rich pointed out. Now, I do think there is a potential leak in another section that involved some structures allocated on the heap. 
