Stave distance

That doesn't fix it, that just puts a band-aid on the symptom while causing other problems instead.

Staff distance doesn't change randomly, but rather, in response to the position of the elements in your score. Almost certainly, you have some element in your score that has been manually moved way out of position, far below or above the staff to which it is actually attached. That must be the element you had selected when you disabled autoplace. So instead, select that same element again, re-enable autoplace, and then hit Ctrl+R to return it to its rightful position., If you want it to appear on a different staff, you need to add it to that staff directly.

If you need further assistance figuring out what is going on, please attach your score so we can understand and advise better.