Repost: Persistent connections is not persistent

Actually I don't know if this problem is a PHP-, an Apache- or a MySQL-issue, but in this forum probably a lot is using the same combination of servers, so probably someone has an experience to share with me. I'm running a PHP-build website (using PHP 4.0.6) and an Apache-server (1.3.20) on a Windows 2000-server. PHP is running as a Apache-module. Most of pages is password-protected using .htaccess-files. The website is connecting to a MySQL-server (3.23.41) using pconnect(). The setup of the MySQL-server is the default in regard of the max_connections-variable (set to 100). As far as I understood, the mysql_pconnect-mechanism should reuse earlier connections made by the same user. However, I can see, that very often just a reload of a page is opening a new process, and suddenly the max_connections-limit is reached: The user is getting 'Too many connections'-errors. The SQL-server is restarted and soon after the user get 'MySQL Server has gone away'-error. On more reload of the page makes a new connection. Before I decide to raise the 'max-connections'-setting, I would be nice to hear from anyone with a similar experience. Is there a better solution, for instance using mysql_connect() and mysql_close() instead of mysql_pconnect. Or is this just a wellknown problem in MySQL? Anyone?