"Pedro J. V. Mendes" via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army
knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:
> OK, (only) after starting with emacs -Q does the password prompt (and
> the focus) appear at the mini-buffer.
>
Yes, that is expected. The minibuffer prompt should hide your password
with asterisks as you type it.
I think this may not be a bug in Emacs, but a problem somewhere in your
Emacs configuration. Comment out parts of your .emacs until you find
the culprit.