Comment 5 for bug 11574

It seems I forgot to add a note: it works for me here.

gnome-panel is not calling gnome-open, but uses the same mechanism as
gnome-open. This is the right thing to do: it uses the default handler for ftp,
sftp, etc. The problem here is to know how the default handler is defined. Do
you have something in /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/ftp (or sftp)? Is
/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/unknown/enabled set to true?

In the end, what's happening is that we're calling
gnome_vfs_url_show_with_env(). So the problem is in gnome-vfs or in the user's
configuration. I don't know.