I may have found the disturbing answer to my question.  According to the code I'm looking at in modules/tm/t_reply.c it adds this comment after sending the reply with body:

 

 /* this is ugly hack -- the function caller may wish to continue with
  * transaction and I unref; however, there is now only one use from
  * vm/fifo_vm_reply and I'm currently to lazy to export UNREF; -jiri
  */
 UNREF(trans);

Does this mean the transaction is released after using the t_reply_with_body () function?  If so, is there any way around this?