Using IE, i go to a site ending .php ... and instead of loading the webpage it offers to download the file?

Answer 1

It's possible that this is the intended behavior. You can use PHP (and any other) scripts to simulate downloads.

Answer 2

This generally means that the header 'Content-Type' has not been sent correctly. For HTML webpages - which obviously include HTML pages generated by PHP, ASP, JSP, etc. - this should be 'text/html', possibly with other information. The 'Content-Type' header can be forcefully overwritten with PHP: header('Content-Type: x',true); but if you are getting the error in webpages it most likely means that the server isn't handling PHP files corretly. _Most_ scripts will use the 'Location' header to inform the browser of a file's real location if it is being requested via script (eg. for tracking or security/anti-leeching purposes), although some may directly output the data via use of the or 'Content-Disposition' header, which basically allows the script itself to output the file data, whilst the header informs the browser of the file's intended name - such as 'file.zip'. Any way, that's a different issue - to re-iterate, I would imagine that the server is not sending the 'Content-Type' header correctly; if you open the page in another browser, it may default to text/html or text/plain, displaying the webpage as normal or as plaintext. It may be worth sniffing the incoming packets or using a free program such as 'ieHTTPHeaders' to see what you are actually receiving.