User Preferences resetting upon each time I open AI

Hi, I'm experiencing some frustration specifically with Adobe Illustrator - I normally have it set to User Interface > Brightness > Medium Dark. This resets to "Light" each time I open it up, which is especially annoying at night time. Further, my Appearance of Black is also resetting, which is a huge problem for exporting CMYK files to print. I need the black to always be displayed accurately, not just as "Rich Black," and it's a burden to be paranoid about this feature each time I'm working on a file. It seems to be a problem since the last update to AI 28.2. Will there be an update soon that fixes this? I'm working from a 14" MBP, OS12.4. 

I tried renaming my preferences folder for version 28, a new one was automatically created, and this, again, saved default preferences...please help