For some reason I can't seem to ftp to or get files from any ftp server. Everytime I try it says that I time out. I have turned the attempt time up to 90 seconds and still no go. I can ftp into the same sites from other machines at the same time and from this machine if I boot into Windoze. I would really appreciate any help that you can give!

I don't know how the machine is setup and how it is configured to access the internet. It can all make a big difference to how you should connect with ftp especially if the machine is behind a firewall.
First of all you should check if you can ping the ftp server. If you get that far then a connect would probably work too (unless you've got really strict firewall rules). If it's not able to connect then there must be some rules which are blocking it, but if it is connecting but just timing out trying to get the directory listing then there could be other things going wrong. You could try setting your ftp client in passive mode. Although passive mode is default on a lot of ftp clients.
If you are using a linux machine to masquerade your connections then you could also try loading a ftp module which handles all the problems of masquerading ftp traffic.