Thanks everyone for the tips. After trying to put the filename in both single and double quotes and escaping the spaces with \, I still kept getting the same error -- even though these solutions worked when I manually logged into the FTP server...so, I turned to the source. After finding the source for the FTP.pm that was installed on my system I found this:

sub get
{
...
 croak("Bad remote filename '$remote'\n")
    if $remote =~ /[\s\r\n]/s;
[download]

So, it looks like FTP->get was throwing out the filename before it ever requested it from the server. I checked on CPAN and sure enough, I had a really old libnet and Net::FTP installed. Newer versions do allow spaces in the filename.

perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::libnet'
[download]

cured all my woes. Thanks again for the suggestions. --RT