BE Agent crashes

We have a problem where our BE agent crashes right at the beginning of a backup. This doesn't happen every time we run a backup, and it doesn't happen every day. It happens randomly and without warning, on b2d jobs and on tape jobs. It seems to affect 2-3 tape backups per week, and happens about 3 times a week on other jobs. The workaround we have is to restart the BE services, but we still lose a backup when this happens. I have tried dropping and rebuilding the database, but the problem persists. This is running on a 2008r2 server. Is this a known issue? Can you recommend a course of action?

Thanks!