After a few days of monitoring the logfiles I noticed that I was getting multiple xinetd logfiles with an incrementing filename.
The configuration file for the logrotate utility had an error which can cause this issue.

Here is the /var/log directory listing after 4 days worth of logs:

xinetd.log
xinetd.log-20060108.gz
xinetd.log-20060108.gz-20060109.gz
xinetd.log-20060108.gz-20060109.gz-20060109.gz
xinetd.log-20060108.gz-20060109.gz-20060109.gz-20060110.gz
xinetd.log-20060108.gz-20060109.gz-20060109.gz-20060110.gz-20060111.gz
xinetd.log-20060108.gz-20060109.gz-20060109.gz-20060110.gz-20060111.gz-20060112.gz
xinetd.log-20060109.gz
xinetd.log-20060109.gz-20060109.gz
xinetd.log-20060109.gz-20060109.gz-20060110.gz
xinetd.log-20060109.gz-20060109.gz-20060110.gz-20060111.gz
xinetd.log-20060109.gz-20060109.gz-20060110.gz-20060111.gz-20060112.gz
xinetd.log-20060110.gz
xinetd.log-20060110.gz-20060111.gz
xinetd.log-20060110.gz-20060111.gz-20060112.gz
xinetd.log-20060111.gz
xinetd.log-20060111.gz-20060112.gz
xinetd.log-20060112.gz
Here is the original faulty /etc/logrotate.d/xinetd file that controls the log rotation for the xinetd process:

/var/log/xinetd.* {
    compress
    daily
    dateext
    .
    .
    .
}

The problem with this entry is the * wildcard in the filename. 

fix:

/var/log/xinetd.log {
    compress
    daily
    dateext
    .
    .
    .
}