too many open files

Agent (10.2.0.4) crashes – on a site (64-bit) with many databases (10.2.0.3) a lot, intermittently – , too many open files, emagent.trc gives ‘health check’ error Agent gave messages – in the past – like this: Number files opened by Agent is 1140. These files appeared to be the $ORACLE_HOME/dbs/hc<instance>_.dat which is loaded a lot