I think the answer to your question was yes - the edit comment does seem to imply you're connecting to a local custom server
I've seen this before with my buddy's computer. But he was getting an error about port 9000 failing to connect and it was on my server host side. There was also a message in the DBG log about it. In your case, it appears that the client thinks its working properly. My server is bigtime under construction but it does support ROF2 if you want to try and connect. It would at least eliminate the client version being part of the problem. My friend that's logging in is also using ROF2 so I know it works from external IPs. It's called MarkusDaBrave's ICEQ Server.
Side question - If you let it sit there, does it eventually give an error message or do you just stay in limbo?