Virtual Products link fail....kind of

[lonimcintosh]

Hi! I am using Joomla 2.5, VM 2 and the Shipment with Virtual Products plugin to do free and paid downloads. I was stuck on getting it to bypass paypal for awhile, but found answers cruising the forums. Finally got it to work last night - it emails the person, I manually "confirm" the order, then it emails the person again with a link. The link LOOKS LIKE it downloads the product (they enter my download stream as "productname.jpg" with the same name as the media file I set for it and the correct size in kb), but when I go to open the file, it says the file type is unknown, or an invalid file (depending on the browser....I tried with Mozilla and Chrome).

I tried it with many different products, checked all of the filenames and media paths. Everything was normal. I went in and clicked the same link AGAIN, and the second image it downloaded was correct. So now I've tried many and ON ALL OF THEM, the link given by the email in response to the order downloads a faulty file the first time, but if clicked more than once will download the correct file successfully.

I can tell my customers to try the link more than once if they have problems the first time, but I foresee a lot of "it's not working!" emails and I would rather have it work correctly. Anyone have any idea what's going on? It makes no sense to me. I would love help! Thanks