Firewall(s) "maxed" out

["Regan, Sharon" <Sharon_Regan () newcourt com>]

Hello People: 

My organization has two primary Internet firewalls at two separate
locations.  One is a Raptor V4.0 running on Solaris 2.5.1 and the other is
Altavista 96 running on D-UNIX V3.2C.

During the past two days, both of these firewalls became "maxed" out, for
lack of a better term.  Specifically, both machines had reached their
maxtask limits and could no longer fork any new processes.  A check of the
systems revealed very large numbers of HTTP connections from individual
internal client workstations.  

Does anyone know of some "new" browser plug-in or service pack which could
be responsible for this ??  It has been suggested that IE5 runs each new
browser window as a separate process and that perhaps this could somehow be
responsible.  The problem was first exhibited at one of our locations
yesterday, and then at the second one today.

Both firewalls are old and have been in production for many years.  Neither
can be replaced / upgraded due to a Y2K freeze.

Any ideas on what the culprit could be would be appreciated. 

Thanks. 

SR