I had the same problem. My DVD was integrated as ide-atapi and my cd-writer as scsi-emulation. I changed to scsi-emulate both of them. This solved my problem.
I use Konqueror since a long time ago as my favourite ftp-client. I can splitt windows as i want which makes coping from filesystem into a ftp-site very easy. On my machine i could also use kbearftp://user@www.domain.com seems to be the same as ftp:// only. KBears ServerList is also integrated in the toolbar of my Konqueror, don't know how i've done this (default??) but its fine to choose from the registered servers.
