MySQL DataConnections Not Closing/pooling?

I am working on completely redeveloped website and sales system and have come up against this Max_connections issue surprisingly quickly.Closing/Pooling MySQL ODBC connections Recently, but have since tried a few other things, still drawing a blank, but have more detail to offer...I have a built a pretty complex sales process, and in creating an invoice I seem to be leaving 7 "processes" running each time. I have counted the number of times the data connection is used during the process of creating an invoice, and it is 7-9 depending on a few conditional values, so effectively the data connections are not closing at all.To try to speed up coding, I have made a couple of functions which handle my database connectivity, so I will post these below.

Firstly, my connection string is:

"DRIVER={MySQL ODBC 3.51 Driver}; SERVER=mysql.dc-servers.com; DATABASE=jamieha_admin; UID=USERID; PASSWORD=pWD; OPTION=3;pooled=true;Max Pool Size=100"

The functions which I am using to open and close and do stuff with the database are as follows:

Function connectionString(sql As String, closeConnection As String) As OdbcConnection
Dim DBConnection As String = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings("dbConnNew").ConnectionString
'this is getting the connection string from web.config file.

[code]....

I am not sure whether making all these functions is making my life easier or harder, but I was trying to reduce the code in each file where data acceess is required, but I'm not convinced it has.However, it has made it clear where and when I am opening and closing the database (or at least trying to)The processes are not being closed though. If I run my sale process through 3 or 4 times in quick succession, with these 7 processes still being live and added to, I get the max_connections issue.

a) Is my connection string correct, is there a better connection available for MySQL?

b) Using this method, creating a ODBCConnection Object, is it possible to close it within a function like this?

c) Why is (CommandBehavior.CloseConnection) not closing the connection (this problem arose before I tried closing the connection manually)