Anyone know of a fix for this? if i pan the uv view with the middle mouse button, the viewport becomes blank because it's jumping to some random point in space. if i hit 'f', i can go back to where the uvs are, but that means i just can't pan at all, which makes the uv view pretty useless.

the viewport will sometimes work fine and other times won't work fine and i haven't nailed down what exactly is breaking it, but it keeps reoccurring a LOT.

I've had the problem with blank viewports a few times. My guess is that there are issues with the camera clipping. I believe the UV viewport is just a 3d viewport with and orthogonal camera. I've had and still have issues with handles disappearing due to camera clipping, weirdly enough, geometry was not affected, but it was fixed by adjusting the camera clipping. You can play around with the clipping settings or turn the automatic clip distance adjustment off in the display settings. Maybe that helps.
The viewport cameras and camera system are in dire need of an overhaul for years now. It always had problems.

Also try backup your prefs file and let Houdini generate a clean one. There are some settings that can affect viewport navigation behavior. (setting pivot for tumble etc.)

I am running into this non stop today in the scene view. I found the only way to fix it is to select home on selected from the view dropdown. Hitting the shortcut dont work for me.