Hi Maverick.
This has been bugging me and my community for a while. Sometimes when logging in as a full registered user of the forum, only the public categories are shown. Logging off and logging back on sometimes solves it, sometimes not. I tried CTRL+F5 to refresh the page, close the brownser (Chrome) and open it. Sometimes nothing works and I have to wait for another day to see the full categories list.
I saw other people have similar issue. Changing TinyEditor to JCE Pro didn't change the problem. Still there. Any hint?