System Preferences opens to a blank, white window

Disk Utility->Repair permissions. If that doesn't fix the problem, create a new admin user account, log into it, and launch System Preferences. Report back.

Duh! My error—senior brain fart. Move the com.apple.systempreferences.plist file onto the Desktop, restart, and see if that gets it back.

I don't know if this will help: it used to work well in 10.3 and earlier, and quite often in 10.4.

Strange behaviour by System Preferences can often be fixed by trashing com.apple.preferencepanes.cache in Home > Library > Caches folder. Trash com.apple.preferencepanes.searchindexcache as well if you have it.

If this alone doesn't fix things after a logout/login, then trash them again (because it will have regenerated more bad files), together with com.apple.systempreferences.plist in Home > Library > Preferences folder, and in the Home > Library > Preferences > ByHost folder, the files com.apple.systempreferences.xxxxxx.plist, where xxxxxx = a hexadecimal numeric string.

You need to log out and log back in again for this to have any effect (or restart if you prefer).

If none of this helps, you will need to look in your log files to find out why your preference panes are not opening: the simplest way to do this is to use Console.

Open the Console application from /Applications/Utilities. It will default to showing the "Console Messages" and possibly the "system.log". Use the File menu if necessary to get both these logs open, and use the Broom tool to Clear both windows.

Now try to open System Preferences and see what appears in either of these windows. Copy and paste it here.

You may see a message saying "Crash report written to <pathname of crash.log>". If so, click on the "Logs" icon at the top left in the tool bar (preferably in another window). Then, depending on the <pathname of crash.log> in your message, look under either ~/Library/Logs or /Library/Logs by clicking the disclosure triangle, then click the disclosure triangle for "CrashReporter".

Find the crash log corresponding to your message and select it. It will open at the end of the log. Look back for the last line of asterisks in the log, then post everything after that to the end of the log.

I'm having the same issue with a blank system preference screen and terminal is also blank. I found that by starting in safe mode that the system preferences are then visible and work. Now I'm trying to figure out what extension or preference is causing the issue. Anybody have ideas on how to systematically eliminate the items that do not load in "Safe Mode"?

Resolving conflicts in an account, requires creating a new admin user account, logging into it, ensuring that the problem's gone, and then deleting the bad account, selecting the save data option, recreating the bad account using the same username/password combo, logging out and back into the recreated original account. If the problem's solved, open the saved data dmg file in /Users/Deleted Users/, open the /Library/Preferences/ folder from the saved data, open the current /Users/restored account/Library/Preferences/ folder, and slowly copy plist files from the saved data folder to the current one that don't exist in it. Log out and back in to ensure there's no conflict and things still work correctly. Resolving conflicts or identifying corrupt plist files is a laborious process. Good luck.

See http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4703015 for more details on this process.

Thanks for the feedback. Does your profile info change mean you reverted back to Tiger?

OK. We'll await the results with the new RAM.

Run the Apple Hardware Test suite, extended tests at least twice. If no errors reported, download and run Rember.

Have you tried resetting the computer's PRAM? That holds some RAM information that may help the problem if this is indeed a RAM issue, which it seems to be...