Nagios 2.10 opening numerous cmd.exe tasks on a Windows box

Hi there,

We use Nagios in our organization to check the status of one of our Windows boxes.

Specs:
Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 - SQL Server 2005
Pentium III, 1400 MHz, 1.25 Gb RAM

About a week ago this machine slowed down considerably. It was so bad we had to reboot the machine. When we took a look at the eventlogs we found about 150 error events with the following errors:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: NRPE_NT
Event Category: Services
Event ID: 3
Date: 13-4-2008
Time: 22:11:20
User: N/A
Computer: Sxxx-ASxx-SQLxx
Description:
NRPE_NT: Bad return code for [The check didn’t respond within the timeout period!]: 5

In the Task Manager I found numerous instances of the cmd.exe running (that was before we rebooted the machine).

Any users here who have experienced this problem? If yes, how did you guys solve this?