One day out of the blue (so we thought) all of our downloads broke. No one could access any of our downloads via the DocMan 1.5 component. After two days of server migration (actually moving our site to a different host) and troubleshooting, this is what we found:

I had forgotten two of the most helpful tools in debugging any system:

1) Error Logs and messages

2) Asking myself the question: "What was the last thing I changed?"

I have found the practice of setting the Joomla "Error Reporting" Global Configuration to "System Default"  to be good. However, when I need it, I forget to change it to something more useful, like "Maximum".

After seeing the exact error:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare _PEAR_call_destructors() (previously declared in [xxx]/PEAR.php:773)...

I immediately went searching Google for answers. I found this post: LyftenBloggie Support Article which didn't help much, but ultimatly lead me to ask the inevitable question: "What was the last thing I changed?"

The last thing I changed was to add a "latest blogs" module to show on every page of our website. We use LyftenBloggie and although I find it to be a great component to create blogs, it is lacking. Mainly due to the lack of upgrades and support by the developer.

So in short, the LyftenBloggie component was being inserted into every page by accessing the module. Once I disabled this module, the problem vanished. DocMan and any other extension that uses PEAR will have trouble. Although this fixed my issue, the problem still remains... why is there PEAR incompatibility between ANY extension? Shouldn't they all use the same library?