Unable to download Excel or other file over SSL under IE8

Ever since IE8 hit the streets I’ve been having a horrifically nagging issue where all our files that normally download over HTTPS no longer work. They download correctly under FireFox or Google Chrome, but not under Internet Explorer 8. I’ve tried googling it many times through the months and finally found the issue. It has to do with cach-control headers in the head of the server response. In my context we are generating some Excel documents on the server and pushing to the browser. We were setting Pragma to no-cache in our PHP header like such: “header(‘Pragma: no-cache’);” Removing this little guy fixed the issue. If you’re unable to do this on the code side, Microsoft has some nice Registry hacking to fix the issue on the browser side.