queue files

[SUBSCRIBE MAILSCANNER George]

We are currently running MailScanner 4.26.8-1 with sendmail 8.12.6-159 on
SuSE SLES 8.1.  I am finding that there are many 'childless' q* files being
left in the inbound queue directory (/var/spool/mqueue.in).  These q* files
have no corresponding d* files and they eventually seem to dissappear, which
I assume is because sendmail sees them as having not been sent after so many
days.  They are not really hurting anything except for the fact that
MailScanner, and MailWatch, seem to think that the inbound queue is really
huge and subsequently I am seeing higher loads on my mail server than I
would otherwise.

I have occasionally cleaned out the childless q* files and have seen my
loads drop considerably.  We process about 30K mail messages a day through
this server yet the amount of childless q* files is about 300 a day.

It has been proposed to me that I set a daily cron to clean out the
offending files, but I would rather fix the problem.  Has anybody out there
seen this and how have they dealt with it?