I do not think this is a Ventoy issue - I have successfully installed other distros and OSes to this machine using this Ventoy drive, the “perpetual” most recent is Manjaro because grub does not work properly if another OS is installed after Manjaro. I continued the boot process and was able to login to User2 with the new password. Rebooted again, this time to a command prompt, and successfully changed the password for User2 using the same process as my initial post. Updated the system and added a 2nd User, and rebooted without issue. The installation went without issue, and the system rebooted.

Next I burned LMDE-5 to a new USB Drive (no Ventoy), and reinstalled from it.

I reinstalled LMDE-5 several times with this Ventoy drive, and got the same results. Thinking it might be related to IntelVMX, I enabled virtualization technology from BIOS. I would get the same results when booting LMDE-5 in Recovery Mode. Most of the time I could restart the system with Ctrl+Alt+Delete, but not always. Most of the time the 2nd error would repeat after pressing any key, but sometimes it would give the 1st error. Code: Select all Reloading system manager configuration

Ventoy .deb