What happened to my scalability and lighting?

Suddenly my scalability settings are unresponsive and the lighting is incredibly bright. If I trash the saved, derived data,. and intermediate folders and restart the project a few times it eventually corrects itself. However, a few minutes later the same issue occurs. I have opened it in 25.3, 25.4 and 4.26 and it is the same. The technical artist on our team has never seen the issue before and we are all stumped. On a deadline and desperately need help. I have attached an image of the camera view when looking at a directional light. Thanks in advance, J