My customers are reporting problems that every so often they are unable to view pages on their sites and receive 403 forbidden errors, but other times, they can view them fine. I just checked and can confirm this. I checked the error logs for a domain hosted on the server and the following error appears:

[Sun Sep 21 13:38:45 2003] [crit] [client 81.129.111.223] (24)Too many open files: /home/httpd/vhosts/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to chec
k htaccess file, ensure it is readable

Can anyone help please?

I remember this was a bug in Apache. Does this file even exists?

Same problem here, no the file doesn't even exist? What is the fix? We are running Apache 2.0

Check the AllowOverride option in virtualhost entry for the site. It shouldn't be setup All.