[followup-to set]
In article <Xns93CAA5CC6F493jpmvrealtime@216.128.74.129>,
Martin Vuille wrote:
> Here's the problem: if I try to download a file from the Internet
> (via HTTP) to either of the Win2K boxes, the transfers completes
> correctly, the tranferred file has the right length, but the data
> in the file is corrupt.
>
> But, if I download the very same file (also via HTTP) to the Linux
> box, the data in the file is OK. 100% of the time.

Your Linux box should have a program "md5sum" installed. Use that to
compare the files. ("man md5sum" ... it's very easy to use.)

> How could the other end possibly know the difference between
> the Linux box and the Win2K boxes?

This one has an easy and obvious answer: the HTTP client sends an
identification string to the server upon request. Microsoft (among
others) has been known to use this feature to block out non-approved
browsers.

It could be this, although that seems unlikely. It's also possible that
the HTTP client request being sent is malformed. So try different
clients on Windows ... Opera? Netscape? Try wget for Windows. You could
also try Cygwin, and use any of the POSIX-compliant browsers available.

You didn't mention if this is with just one server, or with multiple
sites. The URL alone might be misleading: it's easy and commonplace to
host many domains on a single server. Try from a server you KNOW to be
unrelated to the ones you've already tried.

Do you have a Linux system behind the firewall? Does it have similar
problems? I wouldn't think that the NAT/packet forwarding process could
cause this kind of issue, but it might not hurt to rule that out. First
try the different clients and different servers; that seems more likely
to be the source of the problem.

The Windows machines are trying to download from a remote site to their
own local filesystem, correct? It's not saving the file to a Samba or
other network fileshare, is it? If it's a network share, the problem
could be with the server providing the share.
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