I have been having this issue for a few days now and have no idea where else to look. I have implemented Volunteers for Salesforce for a client and so far it has worked...okay. The volunteer portal piece has been functioning correctly up until a few days ago where it simply will work fine for some users (Contacts) trying to access it and completely refuses to work for others, displaying the SFDC built-in Authorization Required VF Page and throwing an Attempt to de-reference a null object error, and I can't seem to figure out why. I have checked permissions on all the fields I have displayed in the field sets a million times and I don't think that would be it anyway because usually when if somebody adds a new field to the fieldset and the guest site user profile doesn't have permissions it throws an error right away saying exactly which field does not have the permissions.
For those unfamiliar with Volunteers for Salesforce, what I am basically trying to do is provide access to a few objects for Volunteers to sign up for events using the Site functionality in Salesforce to users who are not internal. Some work and some don't work and I have no idea why. This is not being hosted on any website it's just --mydomainname.secure.force.com/GW_Volunteers...etc.