MaxRequestsPerChild on win32

[Jean1]

Hello,
Although I had been running xampp for years without much trouble, lately I had gotten some situations where apache would not respond anymore. After restarting apache I noticed lines with 'Forcing termination of child x' in the error log. After some googling I concluded that I had to set MaxRequestsPerChild to a non-zero number, 300 in my case.
After that, I did not have the non-responding problem anymore, but off course, once in a while apache would restart because MaxRequestsPerChild was reached.
I just noticed in the documentation that the default for MaxRequestsPerChild is 10000.

I wanted to buy a new machine anyway and I kind of hoped this problem would then disappear but alas.. So it's probably not the hardware.

My questions:
1 I read somewhere that apache on windows only spawns *one* child, so that when it restarts because of MaxRequestsPerChild reached, it restarts the whole server. This is consistent with what the logs tell me. Is this true?
2 I have searched my mind (and the logs) over and over again to as what I could have changed that causes these memoryleaks, if that is what they are. Off course I'm fiddling with my scripts, but that's nothing new. What could be a possible cause?
3 Anybody else using a non zero value for MaxRequestsPerChild, which value and why?

Thanks for clearing some things up.