I just checked that it works for me fine, both excel and text - OSX server, Safari browser on OSX and Netscape on OS9. I suspect this has little to do with the browser as such but with the server. If all characters are garbled, character encoding conflict is to be suspected. There is an experimental flag, $CFG->unicode, that can be set to true in config.php. May be worth to try it to pinpoint the issue. No idea, though, how safe it is to use it on production site.
I'm having the same problem here, and the unicode setting didn't fix it.
Moodle 1.5.3, PHP 5.0.4 (can't get 5.1.1 to work), Apache 2.0.54.
The Excel spreadsheet that opens has, what looks to be, the drop-down list for the sub-groups, then a lot of gibberish.
Thanks for helping us think this through... Derry
I have come to the conclusion that the problem has something to do with either "separate groups" or setting a limit on the number of times a choice can be chosen. I tried another choice without these restrictions and the download works fine. Quizzes also work fine.
We are using 1.5.3+ and PhP 5.0.2. I believe when my initial problem was posted, we were using the previous stable version. We use a Windows 2000 server.