To the best of my knowledge there is no way out of the box to remove
duplicates from a lookup column. I suspect that the silence means that no
one else has found an answer for this either. Probably the only solution
would be to write an event handler that copied list items to a second list
whenever an item was inserted updated or deleted. That event handler would
check each entry for uniqueness before copying it. The second list would
then become a unique lookup table for the item you wanted. I understand
that is less than elegant, but it's the only way I know of to do it.