Too many open files error?

Hi all,

I have drupal 5.1 running here on a shared host at work in which I do not have admin rights.

I am currently experiencing the following error which occurs for multiple directories:

warning: opendir(modules/htmlarea/xinha/plugins/BackgroundImage/backgrounds/thumbnails) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: Too many open files in /home/xxxx/public_html/includes/file.inc on line 641.

Now I believe it has something to do with how many files can be open so I did a 'ulimit -a' from shell and it is set to 1024 default. However, I cannot change this.

Is this the issue, if so, how can I resolve it?

Thanks
Nav>