Fitnesse for Appian - login with username not retrieving configured password from users.properties

Hi all, 

Seeking some help, our current Fitnesse for Appian implementation has been signing into our application via credentials entered in a SetUp wiki page -

| login with username | fitnesse.user | and password | examplePassword |

This works as expected and allows the automation user to sign in.

I am trying to switch to using the provided configs/users.properties file to sign in with a key/value pair, however the password never ends up getting retrieved from the configs/users.properties file?

# Users used for | login with username | fitnesse.user |
fitnesse.user=examplePassword

| login with username | fitnesse.user |

As you can see, the result of our setup script is as follows (and it stops here)

Site is on 25.4 using SAML, Fitnesse for Appian version 23.4

Fitnesse start.bat script is:

java -jar lib/fitnesse-20230503-standalone.jar -p 8980 -e 0 -f configs/custom.properties

Has anyone experienced this same problem and been able to resolve it?