samba - Jan 2014 - deadtime has no effect, max smbd procs has no effect

We have what we believe to be a design issue with our application
configuration, leading to:
deadtime = 0; having no effect - perhaps number of open files is not zero;
lsof indicates this
max smbd processess = <some value>; has no  effect, this preplexes us

smbstatus -p
Samba  version 3.5.10-125.el6

Our normal smbd processes should be less than 10, however they climb well
beyond the limit in max smbd processes in smb.conf

We are running CentOS 6.3

Any help would be appreciated; any workaround?