Yes I realized after creating the last post that the pma password settings in the Security section had been removed and for good reason.
The pma password is no longer required in a development environment, that is the XAMPP default settings, and poses no security threat but a plain text password for everyone to see in a text file is and so becomes pointless, root and any pma passwords in plain text in a readable by all text file is counter to common sense.
The lesser of the 2 evils is not to create a pma password rather than add a plain text password in a config file giving a false sense of security and is the reason it was removed from the Security page after 1.7.3 because the setting of a pma password created too many issues and was not really necessary.
Security concerns about using a password for pma is purely a perception not a reality in the development environment that XAMPP is created for.