Hi Michelle, thank you for your ideas - yes all of SQL, ESET Apache are up and running and restarting them didn't quite help :-/ That's the main reason I'm puzzled; I would've thought using the virtual appliance means pretty much everything set up already, but looks like there's a lot more to it!
Thank you Martin for stepping in too! I have checked my trace.log but interestingly I do not spot any error clauses in the log after my login failed.. I'm not using a domain and have tried different easy passwords for my 3 deployment attempts just in case by any chance I misremembered/mistyped, such as Password and 123456789, just for the purpose of testing..
Any further ideas..?
Cheers