[Samba] Debian samba 2.2.3-12.3 explosive memory growth

[Neurophyre]

Does anyone have any ideas what might cause samba (specifically, a 
single smbd process) to grow by several hundred K to as much as 2-4 
megs every single time a directory is listed and occasionally when a 
file accessed by a Windows 2000 client?  Eventually the process becomes 
so large that linux kills it, disrupting processes that are trying to 
access data at the time.

This behavior started after I used dselect to install some package 
upgrades on my Debian system, but I am about 99% positive that samba 
was not among the packages upgraded.  The behavior has persisted 
through a restart of samba and a reboot of the system.

Debian 3.0 woody, samba 2.2.3a-12.3.

uname -a:
Linux datacube 2.4.22 #1 Wed Aug 27 23:12:06 EDT 2003 i686 unknown

The system is powered by a VIA Eden ESP6000 x86 processor, has 128MB 
physical memory, and the shares are on a RAID 1 volume.

The system has never exhibited any strange behavior that I'm not used to 
with samba before this time.

Messages like this are appearing in the logs.

Jan 22 00:40:37 datacube kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 2922 
(smbd).
Jan 22 00:54:30 datacube kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 3258 
(smbd).
Jan 22 01:10:19 datacube kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 3589 
(smbd).
Jan 22 01:18:33 datacube kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 3595 
(smbd).

Here's a line from top where one can see the problem.

  261 nobody    10   0  103M  35M  1280 S     0.0 33.0   0:17 smbd

Any advice?