using awk with records that have over 100 fields

[Glen W. Plantz]

I posted an "awk" question several weeks ago, that I'm still having trouble
with. I have a "modified" version of the same question here. Any help would be
appreciated.

I need to use awk to scan a file that consists of lines, each line starting 
with an integer, followed by a _LONG_ (paragraph) line of text that should
have a period at the end of the paragraph, and then a newline character 
following that. The script should save the number at the beginning of the 
line, and if the line does not have a "period" prior to the "newline", to 
print out a message, with the integer number that was at the beginning of
the line.

The problem I've had so far with our version of "awk", is that the lines
(paragraphs) that have too many fields cause an error of the type:
	547
awk: record `   479 Provide techn...' has too many fields
 record number 4

These "_LONG_" lines could have several hundred words on them.  How can
I get awk or another unix utilitity to process this text?