Service Broker - sys.conversation_endpoints climbing higher

Hello everyone.  Hope you are all having a great Friday.

Earlier this week I noticed that the number of items in the sys.conversation_endpoints table for our databases is getting rather large.  1-2million records depending upon the database.  What I cannot figure out is why.  

To start with, here is the counts from the sys.conversation_endpoints table:

StateTOTAL
Total- 1217855
CONVERSING - 1191883
DISCONNECTED_INBOUND - 25407
CLOSED - 547
STARTED_OUTBOUND - 18

Now, as it shows above, there is A LOT of messages in a CONVERSING state.  I cannot figure out why.  The maximum number of messages in any one of 7 queues we have is just under 300, and the majority are at 0 messages sitting in the queue.  BOL states that the CONVERSING state is: 

"Conversing. The conversation is established, and both sides of the conversation may send messages. Most of the communication for a typical service takes place when the conversation is in this state."

However, I don't see where we have 1.2 million conversations happening.

In looking around, I found an article by Remus Rusanu about "fire and forget" found here:  Fire and Forget: Good for the Military, but no for Service Broker Conversations.  However, it doesn't look like in our system, this is the method we are following.

Here is a general setup for our system.

To send a message, we use the following code:

BEGIN DIALOG CONVERSATION @ConversationHandle
      FROM SERVICE CompEngineService
      TO SERVICE 'CompEngineService'
      ON CONTRACT CompEngineContract;

SEND ON CONVERSATION @ConversationHandle 
      MESSAGE TYPE CompEngineMessageType(@TaskMessage)

We use SB to call a stored procedure on the other side of the convesation.  So each of the conversations use an activation stored procedure.  Those procedures look like this:

DECLARE     @TaskMessage xml
      DECLARE @Conversation_Handle uniqueIdentifier

      BEGIN TRY                           
            WAITFOR (RECEIVE top(1) @TaskMessage = Message_body
                              , @Conversation_Handle = conversation_handle
                        FROM  [GenericProcessQueue]
                        ), TIMEOUT 10000

            if @@RowCount = 0 OR @taskMessage is null
                  return
            
            <<< Fun logic goes here >>>
            end conversation @conversation_handle
      END TRY
      BEGIN CATCH<< LOG Conversation and Task Message to error table >>
          END CONVERSATION @Conversation_handle

            IF @@TRANCOUNT > 0

            BEGIN
                  ROLLBACK TRAN

            END
      END CATCH

Does anyone have a clue as to what I am missing here.  When I test the code individually, everything seems to be working as expected and all messages in the sys.conversation_endpoints system finish in a CLOSED state.

Running SQL 2005 SP4 64 bit on 2003 window server machines.

Thanks,

Fraggle