sorry to necro and all but I'm still having this exact issue 5 years down the line, and the 32 bit redist is no longer hosted by microsoft, and I can't find it anywhere
my client works fine with everything else, but when I launch worldserver.exe and login through the client it gets stuck on connecting, and the world server outputs this (the very last line):
Initializing InfoMgr...
>> Loaded base for 1 characters (0ms)
>> Loaded guild for 0 characters (1ms)
>>...