I can't get code transferred to my Arduino Mini Pro
Things have changed in the three years since you last used your FTDI board.

Most importantly avrdude has changed.

You will most likely find that you can program your boards perfectly fine using Arduino IDE 1.0.1.

What has changed is that avrdude has been modified to counter a change in the FTDI drivers. It used to be that the FTDI drivers would pulse the DTR line when the port was opened, but that stopped happening with newer drivers. So AVRDude started asserting the DTR line instead. However it doesn't pulse it, it just holds it low. 

The problem with that is if the DTR is connected direct to the RESET pin the main chip is held in reset mode all the time instead of it just being reset briefly to reset the board.

The "fix" is to place a 100nF capacitor between DTR and RESET instead of directly connecting it. That converts the steady low into a short pulse which resets the board and enters the bootloader.