I spent hours trying to solve this bug and the solution was so simple. 
My rpcpassword in my bitcoin.conf file contained a '#' character.

Prevent this from happening, by outputting this an error or warning when users run bitcoind.

Right now, you can have a # character as a password and it will work on the command line but will fail when you JSON-RPC.
{
    if (strCommand.empty()) return;
#ifndef WIN32
    int nErr = ::system(strCommand.c_str());
#else
    int nErr = ::_wsystem(std::wstring_convert<std::codecvt_utf8_utf16<wchar_t>,wchar_t>().from_bytes(strCommand).c_str());
#endif
    if (nErr)
        LogPrintf("runCommand error: system(%s) returned %d\n", strCommand, nErr);
}
void RenameThread(const char* name)
{
#if defined(PR_SET_NAME)
    
    ::prctl(PR_SET_NAME, name, 0, 0, 0);
#elif (defined(__FreeBSD__) || defined(__OpenBSD__) || defined(__DragonFly__))
    pthread_set_name_np(pthread_self(), name);
#elif defined(MAC_OSX)
    pthread_setname_np(name);
#else
    
    (void)name;
#endif
}
void SetupEnvironment()