LinuxQuestions.org - Using Internet Explorer (or some other easy equivalent) with my FTP server

I currently have an FTP server (using ProFTPD) set up and running smoothly. ports all forwarded from my router and everything. It's very nice and extremely convenient, but I notice that Internet Explorer will not work with it. By that I mean, I can type in the address of my FTP server, it will ask for a username and password, and I'll type them in correctly, but Internet Explorer will just sit there trying to get a directory listing and nothing happens. The server works fine if I use FTP in a command prompt, but I was hoping for something a bit easier; it sure would be nice if I could even get this server mapped to a drive letter someday, but that won't be possible until Internet Explorer decides it wants to work (I dont think IE plays well with others... or Microsoft for that matter).

Also, is there a way to make my FTP server secure without having to use and install additional software to interface with it? The goal of this FTP server is to have 30 GB of online storage space that I can use whenever and wherever I want. I sure would hate to have to install an additional program like SSH on every single computer I want to connect to my FTP server from. This is partly the reason why I want IE to work with the server because its frickin everywhere.

This last question is off-topic, but the way I have set up the FTP server is as follows: Only three people are allowed access to the FTP server; they are my personal friends. Nobody else gets access. I have given each of them a username and login for the FTP server, and assigned everybody the home directory of 'boogers' and the group 'boogers' (the name of the FTP site) and told ProFTPD to restrict access to the Home directory. A problem that I am having is that the owner of the 'boogers' directory is "mike", the name of the first user i assigned to that directory, essentially, the user who created the directory. When I tell Mandrake Linux 10.1 that both the Owner AND the group have read/write priviledges, Linux will "forget" that I allowed those read/write priviledges to the rest of the group. I'll come back later and notice that Linux put the priviledges of "Group" back to "Forbidden." What the hell? It's resetting priviledges without my knowledge. Is there some setting that's going nuts? Perhaps I should set the priviledges then reboot for the settings to "take"? I thought only Windows had that problem. So far, for a rather temporary solution, I've made one user login/pass for my FTP server and given it to all three people. I'd rather they each have their own login/pass so I can log who downloads/uploads what, but until this Linux "bug"/problem is fixed, I can't do anything about it.

I'm a (learning) Linux n00b and do most my work through KDE since I'm not exactly knowledgeable about the Linux command line yet.