Cat6509 Flash card issue

Hey techies.

Our EBiz 6509 runs dual Sup720's. The primary Sup, as of yesterday, began giving me grief. First, Triple-A failed, and only the local admin account was able to connect. Then, when I checked the log, I got a bunch of these errors:

Failed to read process memory of sbin/chkptd.proc
Failed to read process memory of sbin/pipe
Failed to read process memory of sbin/dumper.proc
Failed to read process memory of sbin/pcmcia_driver.proc
Failed to read process memory of sbin/bflash_driver.proc
Failed to read process memory of sbin/mqueue
Failed to read process memory of sbin/flashfs_hes.proc
Failed to read process memory of sbin/dfs_bootdisk.proc
Failed to read process memory of sbin/ldcache.proc
Failed to read process memory of sbin/watchdog.proc
Failed to read process memory of sbin/syslogd.proc

... and about 30 more.

Then I ran a dir with these results:

TCI-6509#dir
%Error opening disk0:/ (Too many open files)
TCI-6509#

A little digging showed that when the above happens, Trip-A cannot run properly.

So, as I've never had to swap flash cards before, and though I assume it's as simple as plug / play, I'd like to hear from any of you who've had a similar experience. My obvious concerns...

as this is the Primary Sup, will I cause a failover if I yank the card? (not that I care, just curious what to put in the EBF ticket).

is it considered good practice to pull the sup first, cause a failover, and eject / replace the card while the sup is powered off?

Thanks,
Mike