Hi! Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, I’m unable to replicate the issue on the Widget Context demo site which is running version 5.5 of WP — the settings are loading fine:

Could you please check if the plugin is still active on your site?
Hi, thanks for the rapid reply.
The widget itself is working and active at the moment.
The main issue is that the theme I am using (Themelia) only opens the widget customization option and not the full customization; my web host support team suggested it was the widget-context plugin that was interfering but deactivating it did not change anything.
do you think it might be interfering with the template customization?
thanks
but deactivating it did not change anything.
If you deactivated the Widget Context plugin and the issue was still present then it must be something else causing the issue. Could you check the PHP error logs to see if there are any warnings generated when this happens?