ESXi, typing any character closes dialogue boxes

[J Lamp]

This is my first kick at installing macOS on ESXi 6.5 and thanks to Donk's Unlocker 3 and his vmx patches it went pretty well. I've downloaded the latest Darwin.iso for the VMware Tools and installed it. I used Sierra as Mac OS X 10.12 was the highest version available under "Guest OS Version." I've seen guides for installing Catalina, but to start out I wanted to keep it simple.

 

However, on certain types of dialogue boxes typing any characters will close the box. As an example, I can log onto the machine without issue. If I navigate to System Prefs > Users and Groups and click on the lock I get a floating dialogue and can type my password fine. If I then try to change my password (dialogue that drops down from the top of the window) as soon as I type any character the dialog closes. 

 

Interestingly I only get this when using the VMWare web interface to manage the machine. Screen sharing (vnc) to the VM on ESXi seems to work fine. I've tried it with a different OS (Win 10) with Firefox, same behaviour.

 

It's such odd behaviour I thought I would see if someone else had encountered this and if there was a fix.