After several hours of going through books, and other resources on the internet, I could not find anything that says what the file permissions should be, on these Directories. I am fairly new to the world of *nix. And I want to make sure I keep it secure. And I don't like the idea of ppl being able to browse through these Directories. But I don't want to block read access, just yet. Because I am not sure if it'll 'disallow' the legitmate users from executing programs.
Any input is very much appreciated. Below is the list of Directories and the default file permissions.

drwxr-xr-x bin
drwxr-xr-x boot
drwxr-xr-x cdrom
drwxr-xr-x dev
drwxr-xr-x dist
drwxr-xr-x etc
drwxr-xr-x home
-r-xr-xr-x kernel
-r-xr-xr-x kernel.GENERIC
drwxr-xr-x mnt
drwxr-xr-x modules
dr-xr-xr-x proc
drwx------ root
drwxr-xr-x sbin
drwxr-xr-x stand
drwxrwxrwt tmp
drwxr-xr-x usr
drwxr-xr-x var

Also, when I use sftp to connect to my box, it connects very quickly, but when I use standard ftp, it takes upwards of 30-45 seconds to connect. What would be the problem?