intermittent problems with ident authentication

[Ben <bench@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have some scripts that connect to my 8.2 postgres server using ident 
authentication, and maybe ~10% of the time, authentication fails like so:

2008-05-20 00:22:54 UTC LOG:  invalidly formatted response from Ident server: "49205 , 5432 : ERROR :dba
        "

xinetd's logs show normal auth activity at these times. This is on CentOS 
5.1. Has anybody else seen anything like this? Or even better, figured out 
what was going on?