I had a problem similar to that a few months ago - it turned out to be a problem with the selected CPAN ftp client having problems with our firewall.

I believe(?) what I did was to remove the ftp entry(don't give it a value), and gave value "q/usr/bin/ncftpget," to the "ncftpget" key.

That's my vague recollection of what I did to solve the problem. I think I had to read the CPAN(?) docs 'perldoc CPAN' to figure that out.

HTH.