Downloaded Products are Corrupted

[Keilup]

I currently have 3 products. 2 are free and 1 is purchased throught PayPal. They are all .exe files. All 3 products end up corrupted after downloaded them after the checkout process. From what I can tell so far, it appears the file downloaded through the store is 2 bytes larger than my original file.

I *think* this was all working fine when I tested before going live. But the first few people that purchased were telling me that when they donwload the product (purchased one) and launch the .exe file, a DOS box briefly opens and disappears. So, to test today, I logged into my cart and first tried to download both of my free products. They don't work for me. When I launch the .exe files, I get the DOS box I've been told about by my customers. That is when I noticed that my files were 2 bytes larger than my original.

I've done some searching but haven't found a solutions. I saw a note about he downloads redirect. My is "false". I needed that anyway for the download functionality to work.

Anybody have a solution or the very least something I could try?

[neil]

You could try zipping up the .exe file and providing the download as a .zip file. And/or you could add the .exe file to a directory, include a ReadMe in the directory & zip up the directory.

[Keilup]

Originally Posted by neil

You could try zipping up the .exe file and providing the download as a .zip file. And/or you could add the .exe file to a directory, include a ReadMe in the directory & zip up the directory.

I guess that's an option but not a great one. Defeats part of the purpose of having an exe file. Some people may not have a zip program either. Not many though I suppose.

However, I'm just plain puzzled why the files are corrupted. I thought for sure this has happened and I could find some info by searching here or over on osCommerce forum. However, I found next to nothing. So I'm not sure if I have something set wrong somewhere, there's a bug in the php code somewhere, or it's just something unique to my hosting environment.

Ultimately I need some sort of solution, zip or otherwise. My live store can't continue as is.

Thanks for the suggestion. I may need to go with that at least until I can possibly come up with some other solution.

[neil]

Yeah. The zip option is not great but may be a work around. The ReadMe could contain info on a zip program etc. I was thinking your exe is possibly being disabled by some wierd antivirus setting - somewhere.

[Keilup]

I thought about putting the info about zip/zip program in the ReadMe. But then I thought, gee, if the ReadMe is in the zip file, then what's the point.

Also, I'm not exactly sure what the point of zipping a directory would be. Other than perhaps when the user unzips, the ReadMe and the exe would then end up in the directory name I used.

Going to try the zip route for now.

[michael_s]

Check to make sure you are putting the files on the server in binary format. This can be the problem. Also make sure that you are not gzipping them on the fly with mod_gzip. This can cause problems, and you can specify that the files not be gzipped at the server level.

[Keilup]

I wanted to report that the problem has been resolved thanks to Michael. It was the gzip issue. I had gzip turned on. I don't remember but I think it was on by default because i don't know why I would have turned it on. I'm honestly not even sure what it would be used for. I turned it off and then it all worked. One note though as soon as I turned it off and then logged into my store to test, I started getting the session error message. It happened to be in english.php. I checked the file and sure enough there were extra lines at the end of the file. Not sure why either because I thought I had eliminated all of these after first install. Anyway, it's all working fine now. Thanks Michael.