and here we are a month later, and it has just started doing the same thing again... had a pile of successful uploads last night, but tonight they just choked it.

I've been having the same problem as well. Talk:Upload had someone that had some success converting line returns from unix to Windows. I just tried that with mine and instead of a Bad File Descriptor error, I now got a Too Many Open Files error. Sounds like something is borked on the server.