browser, html or configuration bug?

Hello,

I have already send almost the same message to the opera-linux group, but
did not get any response there, perhaps someone here has an idea?

I'm struggling with an odd problem:

On our website one can search for publications and the results can be
downloaded as pdf, well, this downloading doesn't work in some browsers.
Here is an example: http://www.pci.uni-heidelberg.de/cgi-bin/tc/ref
search.pl?astring=thiel&tstring=&jstring=&ystring= &psearch=Search

The problem is that with some browsers (e.g. opera, konqueror) the
html-POST-method fails. I've now added another button that uses the
GET-method, but anyway I would like to now why it fails.

Here's a problem description:

1.) If the pdf-filetype is set to using the acroread plugin, loading the
pdf-file never stops

2.) If it is set to using external acroread/gv/kpdf/etc. those programs will
open and complain that they can't open the file

3.) However, if its set to 'save file', file saving and viewing it later on
works fine.


Also, galeon and mozilla work fine, as I was told also opera-6.x, but as I
said not 7.X (including 7.5pre). Even the IE (shudder) works.
However konqueror also doens't work (same symptoms).


A friend was suggesting that may be the http request never becomes closed
automatically, but that programs like mozilla ask the file-server for the
file length and just stop when they have downloaded everything until this
size. Can you confirm this theory? And even more interesting is it a
browser, http or apache (configuration) bug?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
********Bernd

PS: By changing the Content-Type from 'application/pdf' to e.g. 'text/html'
and advising opera to open this type with acroread or the plugin, it works
fine. Very strange ...