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The annealing behaviour of helium bubbles formed by ambient temperature 10 keV helium implantation into silicon has been studied using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and helium desorption spectroscopy (HDS).Although the TEM results indicated conventional bubble annealing processes due to bubble migration and coalescence, the HDS data demonstrated that helium can permeate out of bubbles in silicon around 1000K to leave behind empty cavities, thus giving a porous layer coincident with the original helium implant profile.The addition of a low dose of implanted oxygen to the silicon-helium samples has been shown to strongly improve the stability of the porous layer, at least up to 1300K.