I have no trouble connecting to my FTP server by going to Places > Connect to server...
I can then browse the FTP site to my heart's content with Nautilus for a few minutes.
After a few minutes of inactivity, if I try to bring up a folder on the site, Nautilus just displays a blank page.
The only remedy is to unmount the FTP site and reconnect.
This is quite annoying - is there some timeout issue at play here? Is there some way that I can prevent this from happening?