CFContent / Excel Output issue

Question

I'm trying to do a simple query to output data to the browser
in Excel format but I keep running into the same problem... which
is similar to those I've seen in other posts here. I've been
browsing the forums for a while trying every suggestion I can find
to solve my problem but so far nothing works.
The process is triggered by the user choosing an "Excel"
radio button on a form and then clicking a submit button. The form
action then processes the user's selection criteria through a
series of queries and then attempts to open the output as Excel
data. Like others here, Excel tries to open as the CFM url I called
instead of the XLS filename I've added to the CFHeader tag. The
REALLY strange thing is that if I choose CANCEL and then submit the
form a second time, the file opens as it should... without fail.
If I comment the CFContent and CFHeader tags the browser
displays the report data as expected with no errors.
I believe Excel is tripping up on something but I just can't
figure out what. I have a similar process in another part of my
site that uses a link to trigger the report instead of a form
submit and that works just fine. Am I missing something here in the
difference between a link and a form submit?
Here is where things appear to be failing. The commented
lines are just to show you what I have tried. I'm currently using
the variables.strExcel_Out variable for output. This was created
using CFSaveContent and running the report code
dspSemaReportOutput2.cfm. I've also tried running that directly
without the variable. I get the same results no matter what I
change so I'm missing something.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Success!!
I have to eat my words slightly in that Fusebox was PART of
the problem. Or rather my failure to see how FB was including code
that I was ignoring. This may border on off-topic but I'd like to
post the answer for anyone else struggling like I have for 2 days
with this.
In Fusebox you can include a "global prefusaction" which has
the effect of adding the exact same <CFInclude> at the top of
EVERY page. In our case we have one of those which includes a
template that draws the same page header for everything. This page
header has the line...
<cfheader name="cache-control" value="no-cache, no-store,
must-revalidate">
... which was the root of all my problems. No matter what I
tried I was unintentionally resetting the cache-control value in
the http header.
So in reality the problem was not Fusebox per se... but my
failure to recognize that every thing I tried still included this
one $#@*@!! line of code. This is such a long standing and integral
piece of our site that it was easy to overlook.
See this MS post for more detail:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;316431
I hope this helps someone else.