Now here's an odd one (to resurrect this thread).
For the past few weeks, Safari and Mozilla under 10.3.5 have been acting rather strangely in a manner not unlike that which Knil described.
When clicking on a link to a file (something like
http://www.example.com/downloads/example.tar.gz, the browsers initiate the connection (as one would expect). Then, inexplicably, Script Editor (Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app) is launched. After that, the download fails.
This would also happen if the page used a redirect to a file's URL.
I read this thread and trashed Safari and Mozilla's preferences. Now I find that:
Mozilla's behaviour is unchanged for clicking on direct links or being forwarded;
Safari now starts a download when clicking on a direct link but launches Script Editor and fails to download when redirected to a file.
Double-checked with MSIE. No problems there.
Mozilla doesn't give away too many clues, but Safari shows in its status bar and activity window:
"(whatever the URL is) loaded 0 of x bytes"
then
"Failed to open page" (Activity Window says "cancelled")
If a direct link to the file is displayed, Control-click and "Download Linked File As..." works (although the redirect, launching of Script Editor and failure still occur even as the download is proceeding by that alternative method).
If the link is to an intermediate script which displays nothing, I am unable to download it.
If anyone else has any insights or fixes, I'd be very pleased to know.
Thanks in advance,
David