I encountered a strange problem today and a solution that may or may not be helpful.

Problem: A non-ssl site would pop up a security warning about an invalid SSL cert on a non-ssl page. In addition, errors would be reported from general_functions.php (around line 983).

The test.php described in this post: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54680

would return "I SEE SSL" when called with http.

A number of my hosting partners have began offering fastcgi on their accounts which I have been taking advantage of for some time.

Turning off fastcgi on the account having this problem fixed things. The cert message goes away, the error messages go away, and the above test reports "I SEE NONSSL.

A number of other servers with the same hosting company showed fastcgi to not cause the error. Their reply was there is a core server misconfig on this particular server and is being investigated.

While researching this, I've seen a few other posts describing similar strange behavior. So... If anyone has issues like I describe above turn fastcgi off and if it works again, call your hosting company.

It took some effort to demonstrate there really was a problem, but using the test code in the above link helped much to point the tech to the issue.

One more symptom was that the source line that starts "base href=" would be https when it should clearly be http.

Hope this helps someone.