Strange samba processes (Debian Sarge)

[keenboy]

I have noticed I am getting a lot of samba processes running as root on my server.

The samba services are working correctly it's just the system is listing a lot of processes and a large number of them are these samba processes.

Here is what is listed when running ps aux:

root 9511 0.0 0.4 9396 3992 ? S 08:59 0:01 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 9933 0.0 0.4 9372 4036 ? S 09:03 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 10730 0.0 0.4 9368 3832 ? S 09:11 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 11865 0.0 0.3 9280 3588 ? S 09:18 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 12864 0.0 0.3 9284 3428 ? S 09:26 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 13331 0.0 0.3 9156 3520 ? S 09:33 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 26547 0.0 0.4 9488 3864 ? S 10:32 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 32580 0.0 0.4 9548 4004 ? S 10:58 0:01 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 386 0.0 0.3 9208 3404 ? S 10:59 0:01 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 3777 0.0 0.3 9284 3524 ? S 11:29 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 4184 0.0 0.4 9280 3632 ? S 11:32 0:01 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 6030 0.0 0.4 9820 4232 ? S 11:39 0:01 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 12490 0.0 0.3 9184 3472 ? S 12:18 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 17076 0.0 0.3 9172 3528 ? S 13:01 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 17805 0.0 0.4 9792 4000 ? S 13:11 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D
root 19142 0.0 0.3 9060 3216 ? S 13:27 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D

Does anybody know why this is happening?

Thanks