So as i've suspected that it's a graphics issue, I went into the settings, first thinking it's a drivers issue, since many other posters of slightly different questions have had solutions with changing the drivers/controllers (or even CPU architecture etc). The other thought I had that might be the problem is that i'm running multiple screens on the host. Perhaps the guest VM is struggling to connect with them.
What worked for me was to:
- Shutdown the VM
- Go to the specific VM settings
- Go to the Display Tab
- Under the Screen Tab I increased my
Monitor Count
(which then
indicated an error that the "settings are invalid"), which made me
think of tinkering with the Video Memory
.
- So I increased the
Video Memory
to 64MB (it was 16MB initially)
- Booted up the VM ... and hey
presto it worked ... now i see my login screen