Thank you!!!
I can't tell you how long I was looking at this, for me a .01mF cap between RTS & Reset did the trick. I had already enclosed my project, the FTDI chip worked perfectly for the application (Morse Code - CW - Practice Keyer/emulator) but I couldn't program it directly. I am working on adding some functionality to the sketch and had to pop the chip and seat it in an UNO board to program it, this was getting old (and a few pins were getting bent).