Some ideas from the peanut gallery here -- if you run 'ldd dovecot-auth', what openldap library is it linked into?
The system libldap_r library, which is a 2.2.x release.
Have you tried compiling dovecot against this new 2.3.32 openldap install?
Nope; that's on my list of things to try today.
Have you tried binding as version 2, just to see what happens?
Worth trying. I'll give it a shot. -Ben