<stab-in-the-dark>

Is the CGI script hanging around? It sounds like the client's losing the connection. Anything in the error log? Especially things like:

[Thu Dec  5 12:19:23 2002] [info] [client 217.33.8.36] (32)Broken pipe
+: client stopped connection before send mmap completed
[download]

Try logging successful completion of the script somewhere just to double check that it's completing okay. Also, have you tried serving what the script outputs as a plain document to see if that can reproduce the problem?

</stab-in-the-dark>

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Update:

Probably worth updating to Apache 1.3.27 anyway. Whole bunch of updates, some of them nasty security holes.