Though this isn't a DIRECT answer to your question, I just encountered a similar problem, and thought I'd mentioned it:
I had an instance where it was instantiating a new (no doubt very inefficent) record for data.frame (a result of recursive searching) and it was giving me the same error.
I had this:
return( data.frame( user_id = gift$email, sourced_from_agent_id = gift$source, method_used = method, given_to = gift$account, recurring_subscription_id = NULL, notes = notes, stringsAsFactors = FALSE ))
turns out... it was the = NULL. When I switched to = NA, it worked fine. Just in case anyone else with a similar problem hits THIS post as I did.