header information showing instead of page

when loading query results into a page using jquery load() I recieve header information and funny characters on my page. What could be the cause of this? In addition to this Firefox and Chrome only show this error. IE8 is fine. When clicking around the site instead of opening pages, the download dialogue opens - which tries to download a similar looking file to the 'funny characters' in the jquery results. This 开发者_运维问答problem seems to be linked.

"funny characters" => UTF8-BOM? (Usually showing up as '')

In this instance mod_deflate caused output errors and no actual code is at error. Turning off the module removes the error.