DSconnect-server.exe hangs without opening console window

[HappyBivouac]

I'm walking a friend through setting up a server, but he's encountered an odd issue that I can't reproduce on my system. It seems that after building the server .exe's, the game and search servers launch just fine, but the connect/login server, when launched, does nothing. It won't even open a window. It then apparently leaves 3 processes running, visible in task manager, that will repeatedly start up again when clicking end process. It also doesn't appear to generate a log file.

He's tried starting the whole process from scratch from downloading the source code to building the servers in VS2015 twice now with the exact same result. He's also tried running it from the sln through the debug in Visual studio, and again, same result, with no error messages. I even tried building the exe on my system and sending it to him. Same thing.

I don't know if it matters, but he's on windows 7 64 bit.

This is an extremely odd issue, and it doesn't happen when running dsp on my system. The server runs flawlessly when I do it. It's especially frustrating since I can't attempt to fix whatever it is myself, and instead have to walk him through possible solutions via skype. And no, I can't just host the server myself, as I recently moved to China. It seems even with ports open and firewall configured, I still can't get incoming connections to the server, probably due to the restrictive ISPs and great firewall here. My best bet is to get this friend in the states to run it.

Any help would be appreciated!

[kjLotus]

have you tried connecting anyways and seeing if they accept connections?