Yes, it was the stronger password policy.
What I ended up doing was manually creating the hciuser account, then I re-installed Cloverleaf, it would then skip the user id creation part and continue with a successfull install. I then blew away the hciuser account, and re-configured the CL Service to use the local system account. Don’t know what implications this will have, but it seemed to work, the service started up normally.
Thanks