Cisco Firewall :: ASA 5505 Connection Limit And TIME_WAIT Freezing Device

My little ASA 5505 is working great The device appears to be artificially crippled and limited to 10,000 connections.  This isn't a "CPU limit" it's just some fake limit in the device as far as I can tell.
 
The problem we have is that we are only using around 500-600 connections and CPU usage is only like 25%, and yet the connection count is pegged at 10,000 and locks us out of our network.
 
I am pretty sure this is because there are a lot of "dead" TIME_WAIT connections hanging around not being used.  In our application we only have the couple hundred connections but they do move around a bit every now and then.
 
Is there anyway to get the device to ignore the "dead" connections and not count them towards the artificial limit on the device given that it's pretty clear the CPU / etc., is not utilized sufficiently.  These aren't real connections, we only have a couple 100 established, they do just move around a bit however.
 
We are really only using 500-700 connections according to our servers, the others are just sitting in TIME_WAIT doing nothing.