The existing retry-on-main path in _generate_summary only fires for errors that match the _is_model_not_found heuristic (404/503, 'model_not_found', 'does not exist', 'no available channel'). Other misconfiguration errors — 400s from aggregators, provider-specific 'no route' strings, opaque rejections — fall straight through to the transient-cooldown branch, which drops N turns of context and inserts a static placeholder.
Losing context is almost always worse than one extra summary attempt. Add a best-effort retry-on-main for the unknown-error branch, guarded by the same invariants as the existing fast-path retry: only when summary_model differs from main, and only once per compressor (_summary_model_fallen_back).
Tests cover: 404 fast-path fallback still works, unknown 400 now falls back, same-model aux skips retry (no infinite loop), and a double-failure (aux + main) stops at 2 calls.