Topology, intersections and flat modules

It is well known that, in general, multiplication by an ideal I does not commute with the intersection of a family of ideals, but that this fact holds if I is flat and the family is finite. We generalize this result by showing that finite families of ideals can be replaced by compact subspaces of a natural topological space, and that ideals can be replaced by submodules of an epimorphic extension of a base ring. As a particular case, we give a new proof of a conjecture by Glaz and Vasconcelos.