IE cannot open MS Office files over SSL connection, no problem in Firefox

I have an odd issue, not sure which group to post it in since it
involves IE, Word Documents, Apache, Tomcat etc, but here goes...

I have a secured web environment running Apache 1.3.33 and Tomcat 5.5.9
on a RedHat Linux server. On one page of our java application, we have
stored some reference documentation including pdf files, xls files, doc
files txt files etc.

When users using IE (generally IE5.5, 6.0 or 6.0Sp1) try to download
any Microsoft Office type files from this page, either to view them or
to right click and save-as them, they get the error

"Internet Explorere cannot download thefile.doc from yourserver.com.
Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The
requested site was either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try
again later."

These users can download any other types of files from this page (i.e.
gif, jpeg, txt, html, pdf etc)

We have some users that use Firefox and they have no issues downloading
any files from this page.

We have a development environment that differs mostly in that it is not
secured. From this site, there is no problem with downloading the
files. I've found references on the MS Support site about registry
edits to disable caching that didn't work for me (setting
BypassHTTPNoCacheCheck to 1) and others that said it was a result of
having Cache-control: no-cache,max-age=0,must-revalidate in the
headers. I printed my headers and found cache-control: max-age=0, but
only on the non-ssl site. The SSL site doesn't print this value. I
tried setting a response.setHeader("cache-control", "max-age=15") but I
know next to nothing about this and am just guessing.

Sorry to ramble so much... Any one have an idea? Am I on the right
track here or what?

Thanks for any help.

.

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