pion: Check your logfiles. I'm willing to bet it's the connection to the database.
Flow: I've used a web browser to access ioFTPD before. You can specify full account details like: ftp://[<user>[:<password>]@]<host>[:<port>]/<path>. That will allow you to login to any user you want provided the account doesn't have a hostmask with an ident because most of the time windows users won't respond to that.
You can also create the "anonymous" account, give it the A flag (which means ignore the password given and allow login), and run it on port 21 and then you can just use the ftp://<host> form if you want, or more likely ftp://<host>:<port> for a different port.