Well, I did some investigating and here's what I found.  My ftp script has
had the "quote pasv" command line in it for years.  I use it every day to
sync w/ a unix box, and it works fine.  As I recall I _HAD_ to add that
line to get it to work, because of a firewall at my end (ZA).  Back then
(years ago) I connected via a dial-up modem.

For grins I just took the pasv line out of the script, and everything
still works just fine; I still have ZA running too, but now I go thru my
LAN port to a FIOS router; I imagine the (modern) router's NAT function is
handling the Active Mode connection properly.

reference:  http://www.slacksite.com/other/ftp.html

But, bottom line, with or without it my ftp sessions work just fine. I am
using the (primitive) MS-provided win-xp ftp client. There are many
(better) ftp clients out there, perhaps you should try another.  Or
perhaps your router needs a setting tweak.

Sorry I couldn't be more help.

Sounds right to me. The server is in passive mode, so it's sent the
client a port number to connect to, and is waiting for the client to
connect. The client is in active mode, so it's waiting for the server
to connect to it. And everybody waits forever.