I have similar weirdnesses with my 6.2 boxes, sometime ftp to them works fine, othertimes they stall. inetd does appear to be trying to start ftp, very strange. This is linux-to-linux so I think your windows paranoia is being triggered by a handful of coincidences.
I've never bothered tracking it down since the box I have hooked up to my DSL line, and which I normally use to drop stuff for folks to download, or let folks in to send me stuff, is an old Pentium 200 running RH 5.2 (the box which ran the first demo installation of the bboard module running under Postgres, as a matter of fact!).
Ftp to that box is always reliable so I've never bothered trying to figure out the oddity with the 6.2 boxes (I can always use scp to copy files from one to the other).
