Ok, thanks.
So I had a closer look at the stacktrace you posted.
But that is pretty much confusing.
In Java 9 there were many changes.
One change was, that PlatformClassLoader does not implement URLClassLoader anymore (it is an internal class anyway). Your stacktrace says that Gradle is trying nevertheless to cast the former to the latter and of course fails.
Another change in Java 9 was, that it does not contain a tools.jar anymore.
Actually Gradle checks whether a tools.jar is available in the JDK used to run Gradle and if it finds one, only then does that cast to inject the tools.jar into the system class loader.
So the code that fails for you should not actually run, as tools.jar is not present on a Java 17.
Does your Java installation that is used there come with a tools.jar in the lib folder?
Or did you put a tools.jar there yourself?
Either way, you should probably open a bug report for Gradle to handle the case that there is a tools.jar found but the class loader not being of the correct type more gracefully.