I've never encountered that particular error. A few questions for you that might give me some idea what's going on:

1) Are you running the very latest AbelCam (2.2.4 2008-06-02)?

2) What FTP software is running the FTP server?

3) Have you made ANY manual edits to any of the files in your AbelCam config directories?

4) In your config.xml, is <ChilkatFtp> true of false? If false, changing it to true and re-starting AbelCam solves many mysterious errors.

Glad you got it all worked out!

Here's a bit of explanation of the situation, in case you or someone else reading this thread was wondering:

There are a whole lot of different kinds of FTP servers out there and they don't all behave the same way. For this reason AbelCam actually contains two different FTP modules. When <ChilkatFTP> is false, a small & efficient - but not universally compatible - FTP module is used. When it is set to true, a larger but more sophisticated FTP module is used instead.

Brand new "clean" installs of AbelCam 2.2.4 set <ChilkatFTP> true by default. Earlier versions default to false. Installing 2.2.4 over an older version without selecting "remove configuration and license information" will probably result in it remaining false, since the general policy of the AbelCam installer is to leave existing config files untouched during upgrades. If this happens (which seems to have been the case on your system, Al-J) it is perfectly acceptable practice to manually change it in config.xml with a text editor.