I have an idea on what might cause the problem.
The form and captcha are on the home page and I have a monitoring system accessing that page to gather statistics. I am assuming that every time a monitor accesses the page a new captcha is created.
At least that is what I think is happening when I look at the files being created in the wpc7_captcha folder.
I am running a test with captcha and monitors on. Tomorrow I will clean the folder and switch the monitors off.
I will let you know what the result is.
Is there a cleaning process for the captcha folder to prevent flooding?