I can't remember whether I tried CuteFTP a few years ago.
I did used to use SmartFTP but i had some issues with it. Can't remember what as I remember it being quite good alot of the time.
However since then I have just been using WS_FTP 5.08 which I installed about 5 years ago and it works fine.
The first FTP client I used was the FTP thingy which you can access from the windows commandline by doing 'FTP ftp.server.com'.