Unable to login to new VM clone

[aaT]

I am new to Virtual Box and have the following:
1) Installed Virtual Box on an Ubuntu linux host machine.
2) Created a guest linux VM running Oracle Linux 9. Added 1 user <myadmin> during the guided installation with admin privileges.
3) Installed Oracle database 19c on that guest VM. Added 1 more user <oracle> while installing the database
4) Cloned this VM to see if I could save it as a backup

The cloned VM does not seem to allow me to login using either of the 2 users <myadmin, oracle>. Yet, it allows me to login as <root>

I tried resetting the passwords after logging in as root, but still get the same result. The login screens shows a spinner for several minutes and then simply returns back to the login screen.

Since logging in as <root> takes less than a second, I'm guessing that the startup/init scripts for the other 2 users are somehow failing.

Any thoughts / suggestions? I don't mind actually creating a new VM from scratch and going thru steps 2, and 3 above.

Thanks.

p.s. I searched and also found this previous thread that could be related to the same issue above
forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=110470