If progress is not available try hash, you'll see if its transferring at all ...

To solve your problem for the time being you can ftp your file or tar file (if it involves a series of files) to another solaris server which does ftp correctly to ur PC and then in turn ftp to ur PC.

As andryk stated, hash is a good way to see if the FTP is progressing. If the file is binary then you must state BIN before doing a transfer. It is worth a try, however, I doubt this is a problem since the file would transfer successfully but be left unreadable. Is the destination system a Windows box? Is the source system a SPARC boX?