I was going to give the IPN another shot today and low and behold Jeffrey Wilke had just released a new version yesterday. I am not the developer of this hack and can not provide support for it, but since no seems to be able to get IPN to work, I thought I should point some users this way.
The contrib is not complicated like the others and it is bone dry simple, you touch absolutely nothing in osCommerce. Setup the config file and goto paypal and setup IPN to point to the paypalipn.php included in the zip file.
To setup IPN at paypal, I goto "Merchant Tools" on the top, scroll to the bottom and click on the "Instant Payment Notification", click on "Technical Overview", and finally in the article in the first paragraph click on "Start using IPN". Turn it on and set the full url to http://yoursite.com/catalog/paypalipn.php
Now from what I have tested is that all the paypalipn.php script does is verify the order and set it as a pending order in your cart, so once they hit the pay button, it will show up in the cart. In other words, it gets rid of the dreaded, user doesn't click all the buttons at paypal so you only get their money and no invoice.
So here is the contrib, I hope all of you that are looking for the bare essentials find this as simple as I did when the others were cumbersome and didn't actually work.
http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,1466
or direct download
http://oscommerce.sunsite.dk/contributions...NGateway_02.zip
http://www.oscommerce.com/contributions/Pa...NGateway_02.zip