+1  A: 

CodeIgniter seems to have its own method of gzipping its output (Why, I don't know, but I'm not very familiar with CI.)

According to this forum entry, such an error can occur when PHP error messages screw up the compressed content. Adjusting error_reporting to E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE did the trick there.

Update: There also seems to be a CI config setting:

$config['compress_output'] = FALSE;
Pekka
Will check this out - why, why do frameworks do things like this?
Tim Lytle
Config setting worked great. If only web servers could compress the response in some standard way that would work with any browser and be backwards compatible.
Tim Lytle