I had the same issue with opening the system settings. It turned out that the gnome-control-center had been uninstalled at some point and after installing it again everything is back to normal. I have no idea why the gnome-control-center got uninstalled, maybe some update caused it.
Best regards, Emil Goode -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org