in my tests here I reached that part of the code almost immediately at the starting of program.
if you don't reach it first check in olly that the code at that location looks like:
Code:
:004E91D0 51 push ecx
:004E91D1 53 push ebx
:004E91D2 55 push ebp
:004E91D3 56 push esi
:004E91D4 57 push edi
:004E91D5 8BF0 mov esi, eax
:004E91D7 E824FBFFFF call 004E8D00
:004E91DC 8D3C8500000000 lea edi, dword ptr [4*eax+00000000]
...
then remember to run the game in window mode (I don't know if it's supported because I have never played this game, doesn't work here) and start a race for forcing the reading of the files