After a night of sleep I now learned that the password isn't queried when starting the VM but when launching VMware Workstation, or, to be more precise, when the VM's configuration file is loaded by ...
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After a night of sleep I now learned that the password isn't queried when starting the VM but when launching VMware Workstation, or, to be more precise, when the VM's configuration file is loaded by VMware Workstation. So, everything is working fine now, and this case is solved.