oSettings == null

I have been battling an issue in which the function _fnSettingsFromNode was returning null. Even the the table should have been the same something ( I am not sure of the exact difference ). I had tried to to modify that function to compare by id but that didn't work. What I ended up changing that did work was to modify the following block in jquery.dataTables.js. The part that makes me nervous is I am not clear on what exactly is being done in the block. Can anyone confirm if this valid resolution and not just a hack. Though if the hack works I'll stick with it.

				/* If the element we are initialising has the same ID as a table which was previously
				 * initialised, but the table nodes don't match (from before) then we destroy the old
				 * instance by simply deleting it. This is under the assumption that the table has been
				 * destroyed by other methods. Anyone using non-id selectors will need to do this manually
				 */
//				if ( DataTable.settings[i].sTableId == this.id )
                if ( DataTable.settings[i].nTable === this )
				{
                                        DataTable.settings.splice( i, 1 );
					break;
				}