Commons VFS (FTP) problems

I recently had a problem with Commons VFS whereby I could log into an FTP server and list the contents of the initial directory, but no contents were shown, nor could I otherwise resolve any of the contents or subdirectories. As it turns out, there's a problem with FTPClient which is part of the Commons Net package, and the basis for the FTP module of Commons VFS. After logging in, if the VFS client tries to set passive mode and the server doesn't respond that it allows passive mode (ie PureFTP specifically), then the client just continues as if there's no problem instead of throwing an Exception. The result was getting an error message like "The file root [ftp://myuser:*****@localhost/my_sub_folder] is not a folder". Since I wasn't able to get PureFTP successfully configured to allow passive mode, I was able to resolve the problem by forcing the code to use active mode instead. Fortunately this wasn't a problem since the FTP server in question was on the same machine as the code trying to access it (ie not across the boundary of a router).