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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?
You could probably extend the timeout in your system. Open the gconf-editor using sudo gconf-editor and navigate to desktop -> gnome -> session. There you find a key idle_delay. You can change that value by double-clicking on it. Depending from how long you are typically inactive you change it. So if you usually don't have FTP activity for half an hour set it to a value larger than 30.
There is also an entry in Ubuntus bug tracker and in GNOME bug tracker. GNOME seems to work on a fix.
Probably not preventable easily on your end, and a timeout issue is the most likely cause.
That's a bug against gvfs, which would have to be modified to automatically handle such a situation. In the interim, I'd just remount as you've been doing.
You can report a bug against gvfs on Launchpad.
