Anonymous
My statement will not help to solve the problem, but it might be helpful in some other way.
A couple of days ago, I also installed the antiX 17.4.1 (64-bit, full) in VBox and didn’t have any ‘password issues’ during the installation.
How about making another test install and just enter something simple and completely insecure like “testbox”?
Same for all 5 fields and UNCHECK that auto-login.
The complete antiX installation didn’t need more then some 3 ~ 4 minutes, so no big deal to try it again.