just to follow up. problem solved. it did turn out to be a permissions problem. the account we were running the SQL Job under (apparently) didn't have adequate permissions. i think it's odd that the Job would just hang instead of resulting in an error, but anyway...

thank you to anyone who may have spent time on this.

My script file to get a file from an FTP site works great from command prompt and worked great for 2 weeks from SQL Server 2005 job. Sometime around when the machine was restarted the job never completes. It DOES get the file from the ftp site but the job itself never completes and therefore will not run again at the next scheduled time. Has anyone seen this? It was happening when I first installed winscp3, but after removing that and installing winscp (4.0.3.345) it was working - until now. Same problem.
Script is as follows:

option batch on
option confirm off
open <ftpsite>
cd <directory>
get *.txt <local folder>
exit