To reproduce: 1. Create a new account but cause an error that will keep the account from saving (enter the wrong age for a category or give the patron a username that's already being used) 2. Set some patron messaging preferences 3. Try to save the account and wait for the "The following fields are wrong. Please fix them." message 4. Note that the patron messaging preference selections are gone and you need to re-select them Note, this depends on the EnhancedMessagingPreferences system preference to be enabled This is similar to Bug 26558
This also happens when patron is duplicate (see bug 25228). It seems that when error occurs, default messaging preferences for patron category are used.
I ran into another problem while looking into this, see bug 36368.