Further confusion with the 'too many unique fields in db' error

I have strange symptoms to describe which I hope will ring a bell with one of you…

The error is inconsistent. I run an agent that sends out several notes, between six and nine, depending on other factors. The agent will sometimes fail immediately with the error 'can’t save document, too many unique fields…". Other times, it will send out some of the notes, and other times it will complete successfully. Just now, it failed immediately with the error, I ok and ran it again immediately, and it went through. I did this again on the next failure and it sent four notes, then failed.

I would think that, if it was really a problem with the size of the UNK table, it would fail every time and at the same place…is there possibly something else causing this?