Why does the CATEGORY and START DATE keep resetting back to blank?

I have repeatedly added multiple tasks and the category resets to a blank field and the start date which I have set with various dates consistently becomes unchecked - very frustrated with this

Does it happen on your Gmail account? If so, I cannot provide you any solution at the moment, because Gmail does not support Start time nor the Category. You can set it in eM Client, but once the task is changed on the server, these items are lost.