named crashing with too many open files

[Ben Stern]

Upon further prodding, I've discovered that the problem is that named is
trying ad infinitum to contact 3 particular servers, 2 of which are not
reachable (behind a firewall or something) and one which is dns4.cp.msft.net
- which may also be behind a firewall, but either way is refusing to answer
us.

What can I do to convince named not to spend all of it's open files on these
hosts, but instead do something useful, like answer queries?

Ben Stern