Hello David,
the following notes will not apply to your scenario but might be of interest if people are searching on this search term "Initialization of SAP PERSONAS failed".
BC-PER 2313501 Initialization of SAP PERSONAS failed and the note
BC-PER 2276155 SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP1+2: Disable Personas runtime completely in case no a
Regards, Oisin