APC doesn't free file handles

Hello, I hope this is the right place for this, I didn't find any other
APC related group or list...

I regularly experience my Apache web servers using APC to run out of
file descriptors. Apache complains about "Too many open files".

When I issue "lsof", I get thousands (literally!) of entries like this one:

...... /tmp/.apc.QVkXXK (deleted)

So it seems APC does not free the file handles for some of its temporary
files, although they have been deleted. Restarting Apache frees the
files then, of course.

I'm using Apache 1.3.37, PHP 5.2.0 and APC 3.0.12.
The APCs have an average of 10 to 20 million hits per day each.