your posting is fairly old and I hope you already figured it out by now!
Anyway, try setting the JRST jumper on the board and check the box that is labeled “Use DTR/RTS for Reset and Boot Loader Selection” on the Philips flash utility.
I read that the baudrate is automatically selected in a special piece of the bootloader software called “autobaud”. The computer connected via USB to the LPC board is supposed to send question marks (ASCII ‘?’ ) to the board. The board then tries to synchronize with that and sends something like “Synchronized.” back to the computer when completed.
However, I also tried all this and the Philips utility (communications error) and my board (E2129) still doesn’t work. I wonder what’s wrong. I think either there is no bootloader loaded on chip by default (???) or the chip is defective.
I was able to program the LPC2129 chip using the ARM-JTAG adapter. However, typical uart0 (rs-232) “Hello world!” output from the board was received as garbage by the terminal program on the PC.
I tried the board on another USB port of my PC. Then everything (including the Philips flash utility) started working !!!
I had a similar USB/FTDI problem before when trying to program an Altera FPGA through an external USB 2.0 hub / FTDI combination. Strange. I don’t get why the FTDI part is detected but doesn’t work properly behind a hub or in specific USB ports on the motherboard (I assume those are “hubbed” too).