DBCP is creating active connections on its own, please help

[Demetri Mihalakakos]

I have DBCP setup and for the most part works fine... But on startup  
of my application/tomcat, active connections are being created and my  
application is not the one creating them or requesting them from the  
pool.  It seems it may be my dbcp setup or something on my server, i  
adjusted my maxActive to infinite and it grabbed over 1000  
connections on startup.

here is a part of my conf file
                 <parameter>
              <name>maxActive</name>
              <value>100</value>
            </parameter>
        
                <parameter>
              <name>maxIdle</name>
              <value>40</value>
            </parameter>
            <!-- Maximum number of idle dB connections to retain in pool.
                 Set to 0 for no limit.
                 -->
            <parameter>
              <name>minIdle</name>
              <value>20</value>
            </parameter>
        
                <parameter>
                        <name>validationQuery</name>
                        <value>select * from site</value>
                </parameter>
                
                <parameter>
                        <name>testWhileIdle</name>
                        <value>true</value>
                </parameter>
        
            <!-- Maximum time to wait for a dB connection to become available
                 in ms, in this example 10 seconds. An Exception is thrown if
                 this timeout is exceeded.  Set to -1 to wait indefinitely.
                 -->
            <parameter>
              <name>maxWait</name>
              <value>10000</value>
            </parameter>
        
            <parameter>
              <name>defaultAutoCommit</name>
              <value>false</value>
            </parameter>
        
            <parameter>
              <name>defaultTransactionIsolation</name>
              <value>REPEATABLE_READ</value>
            </parameter>
        
            <!-- Recover abandoned connections -->
            <parameter>
              <name>removeAbandoned</name>
              <value>true</value>
            </parameter>
        
            <!-- Set the number of seconds a dB connection has been idle
                 before it is considered abandoned.
             -->
            <parameter>
              <name>removeAbandonedTimeout</name>
              <value>300</value>
            </parameter>

            <!-- Log a stack trace of the code which abandoned the dB
                 connection resources.
             -->
            <parameter>
              <name>logAbandoned</name>
              <value>true</value>
            </parameter>
        
             <parameter>
              <name>timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis</name>
              <value>60000</value>
            </parameter>
        
             <parameter>
              <name>numTestsPerEvictionRun</name>
              <value>3</value>
            </parameter>
                
                <parameter>
              <name>minEvictableIdleTimeMillis</name>
              <value>600000</value>
            </parameter>

its very bazaar and i cant seem to figure it out.
if any one can help me out that would be great.
Demetri