proc: table is full, tons of 'smbd' processes starting by themselves

Yesterday my iiMac began exhibiting unusual behaviour. Apps would not start, things started to slow down... a restart seemed to clean it up a bit but after awhile the same problems would creep back up.

After some investigation I found that NO new process could be created... already running process and apps continued to work as expected, but nothing new would get started. (already running apps would fail to spawn/fork new processes too)

System.log would list literally hundreds of lines with kernel[0]:proc: table is full. There is a bit of it at the end of this post.

ps -AL listed pages of a "smbd" process, many copies of the exact same process. So it seems something is forking all those "smbd" processes till the proc table gets full and then nothing else starts up.

Can anyone shed some light on what might be spawning those duplicate processes?

TIA
Julio

system log snapshot
May 23 14:02:53 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full
May 23 14:03:00 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full
May 23 14:03:11 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full
May 23 14:03:15 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full
May 23 14:04:21 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full
May 23 14:04:21 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full
May 23 14:04:21 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full
May 23 14:04:21 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full
May 23 14:04:21 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full
May 23 14:04:21 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full
May 23 14:04:21 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full
May 23 14:06:37 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full
May 23 14:06:37 iMacJulio WindowServer[93]: CGXFork() failed with errno=35 in pid=93 euid=0, app to launch=Mach-O/shell /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/MacOS/Terminal\n
May 23 14:06:41 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full
May 23 14:20:27 iMacJulio kernel[0]: proc: table is full



Intel iMAC Mac OS X (10.4.6) SU 003-006 installed May 11th