Help! Can't log on correctly

When logging on to an ftp site, I get through the user/pass stuff, down through some more stuff, then it says this:

Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.

And hangs, waits, then I time out because I don't see any directories on the server, basically can't do anything it perceives as action.

It doesn't seem like I've ever had this problem before I upgraded to the latest version, and it's done this on more than one site. Any ideas? Any options I should try? It seems like switching between active/passive has no effect, I've also played with a couple other options but nothing's worked. Thanks for your help,

Matthew