Tons of handles at startup

I recently noticed that MySQL 5.0.30 starts up with over 50,000 win32
handles when it starts up on several machines in my organization, most
of which are Event objects.  MySQL 5.0.27 (on my personal machine)
starts up with only about 4,000 handles.  A colleague of mine recently
installed 5.0.41 on his machine, and that starts up with about 40,000
handles.

 

I presume that something fundamental changed between 5.0.27 and 5.0.30
to cause this. I noticed this in the first place because TaskInfo on one
of our servers complained that apps on the system were using over
100,000 handles in total.  One of the causes was a handle leak in some
of our own software, which I fixed.  But the other culprit was MySQL.

 

Has anyone else seen this? Was this intentional, or is this a bug in
newer versions of MySQL? We bundle MySQL with our product, so if our
customers notice this, what should I tell them?

 

Thanks for any info.

 

-Sandeep