Tom -
I'd highly recommend leaving root disabled via FTP (as it appears to be right now). Enabling it can leave you open to brute force attacks and eventual server compromise if your root password is weak. Even if your password isn't weak, the probability of compromise is still there (but it would take longer).
If you really need root access to your server via a FTP-ish client, you may want to consider using SFTP via ssh for that. Enabling root access via SFTP isn't a good idea either, but you can shore up your security a bit by requiring keys for your ssh users. This can be a little daunting for beginners, but there's a pretty brief and concise guide which may be able to help you: