Basic authentication & showing EXCEL

[Gert Van der Voorde]

Hello,
I am writing a web application that generates an excel document from a db-query in tomcat.
The way i am generating this is, to use a servlet and set the contentType to excel. Everything works fine without authentication.
When I add authentication to my webapplication, i cannot open the excel - file. Excel gives the following error : "Microsoft excel cannot access the file "filename" .The file name or path does not exits. "
The same error occurs when you put an EXCEL document in a public directory and basic authentication is required for the webapp... When you try to access this file through the browser "http://yourserver/webapp/test.xls", the same error occurs.
I am using Tomcat 4.1.29, Excel 97. I also tested with Office XP(same problem).
The java version I am using is 1.3.1
Does anyone has an idea how to solve this?