All download pages show the same (wrong) file

Plugin version: Download Manager 3.3.62 (free version)
Also installed: WPDM – Elementor add-on
Site: staging environment (can provide live URL if needed)

Description:

We have several separate downloads set up (different files, different titles, different pages), but no matter which download page a visitor lands on, the page always shows the details and download button for just one specific file — our most-downloaded one. Clicking “download” on any of the other pages ends up delivering that same one file instead of the file that actually belongs to that page.

Here’s what we’ve already ruled out:

It’s not a caching issue — we cleared all caching layers and the problem persists.
It’s not a permalinks issue — we reset permalinks with no change.
It’s not a data problem — each download item has its own correct file, title, and settings in the admin editor. The mix-up only happens on the public-facing page.
It’s not tied to one specific page design — we tried switching the “Page Template” option for an affected download to a different built-in template, and the problem still happened.
We also temporarily deactivated the WPDM – Elementor add-on to test. That didn’t fix it — instead, it broke the download button entirely (it stopped working rather than pointing to the right file). Reactivating the add-on brought back the original issue.
Since it happens consistently across every download page and isn’t fixed by anything on our end, this looks like it’s happening in the plugin’s own code rather than something misconfigured on our site. If it helps narrow it down: it seems related to how the plugin figures out “which download is this page about” — possibly connected to a related/similar-downloads lookup feature, since the file that keeps showing up everywhere is our single most-downloaded item.

Happy to provide staging access or screen recordings if that would help you reproduce it.

Any kind of update at all?

Update — we found the actual trigger

We’ve isolated this. The problem is tied specifically to one category: a category named “Downloads” that we created ourselves (not a category that ships by default with the plugin). Any package assigned to that specific category displays another package’s content instead of its own — consistently, reproducibly. When we remove a package from that category, or reassign it to a brand-new category we just created (called “Download”), it immediately displays correctly.

We’ve ruled out our server/database as the cause — MariaDB shows no locks, no stuck transactions, and all tables are InnoDB and healthy (confirmed directly with our host). This is isolated to that one specific category term.

We don’t know whether the “Downloads” term itself became corrupted when we originally created it, or through some other change since — we can’t tell from our side. But the behavior is 100% reproducible: any package in that category shows cross-contaminated content; any package not in that category (including in a freshly created, differently-named category) works correctly.

Given this, we suspect it’s connected to your “Similar Downloads” / related-packages feature, since that’s the part of the plugin that looks up other packages sharing a category — if there’s something off with that specific category’s data (a duplicate term entry, a taxonomy mismatch, or similar), packages in that category could end up cross-referencing each other’s content instead of their own.

Could you check, from your side, whether the “Downloads” category (as it currently exists on our site, if you still have access, or from the description above) shows anything unusual — duplicate term IDs, a taxonomy mismatch, or similar? In the meantime, we have a working workaround (moving everything to a newly created category), so this isn’t urgent for us, but we’d like to understand the actual cause if possible.