System Settings missing almost all options

Meatball Jones wrote:

I have a Macbook Pro, apple M2 8BG and mac OS 15.1.1

Suddenly, when choosing the gear icon for System Settings, there is nothing there except for General and Spotlight.

Clicking on General has no other options.

I have already tried shutting off the macbook pro and then holding down the power to get to the options screen to reinstall the OS but it changed nothing.

I would do a factory reset however - since there is NO settings list for me to choose back up - I can not back it up.

Anyone else have this issue or know of solutions?

A SafeBoot Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support will sort many anomalies

Login and test. Reboot as normal and test. Caches get rebuilt automatically.

I have exactly the same problem on an M1 MacBook running Sequoia 15.1.1. In my case, when the problem arises the normal screen wallpaper won't appear and my OneDrive and Google Drive apps also fail to start, reporting that something is preventing them from starting. I reinstalled the OS and that seemed to clear it, but after a couple of restarts the problem came back. I've now booted in Safe Mode and that seems to fix it for this boot, but I suspect it will reappear it I reboot normally. I now plan to turn off most of my login items and see if I can work out whether any of those are causing the problem. Here's a screenshot of my normal login items just in case anyone knows a likely culprit.

I ran into this as well. I followed advice from @leroydouglas and booted into SafeBoot, then reboot normally. Problem resolved.