Chrome seems to think this closure in hudson-behavior.js is throwing the exception:

function registerValidator(e) {
    e.targetElement = findFollowingTR(e, "validation-error-area").firstChild.nextSibling;
    e.targetUrl = function() {
        return eval(this.getAttribute("checkUrl"));  // <-- Dies here
    };
    var method = e.getAttribute("checkMethod");
    if (!method) method = "get";

    var url = e.targetUrl();

Same for Firefox

Same happens here with Jenkins 1.452 and FF10, pretty annoying.

This seems related to the JIRA Plugin. If I disable it then I can access again the configuration page.

I'm seeing this in the Mantis Plugin.

Having looked through the Jenkins Jira bugs, this seems to be a systematic problem. There are multiple reports of this issue, e.g., see 6542, 6576, 7584, 8789, 8854, 8789, 9494, 11074, 12229, 12875, and others. Developer response is at best "unsympathetic" with a tendency to close the issue. Something is seriously wrong with the system. It could be an architectural issue that allows plugins to screw things up, or it could just be a deep bug in the system that hasn't been truly resolved yet. In my case, I haven't been able to configure Jenkins for two+ months due to this issue. I've resorted to modifying the xml file files to tweak the configuration, but that's not really a solution. At this point, Jenkins simply doesn't work, period; I can't configure jobs, it's that basic, Jenkins doesn't work. My next "work around" is to switch back to Hudson.

moved to jenkins LTS, works fine.

change priority to Blocker

Mmhh, now my issue with the Jira plugin is fixed with Jenkins 1.455...

Tried with both Long Term Release (1.477.1) as well as Latest and Greatest Release (1.461) and this issue manifests in both.

https://www.google.com/search?q=jenkins+loading+overlay has tons of hits!.
Where is the static files served yui files served from in jenkins I woudl like to replace yui library in the war extract and re-run jenkins and see when it picks up new yui libraries does the problem go away?

I recently went through and removed (from the file system) all disabled plugins, and this problem went away after I did that, and restarted. I'm not sure which plugin caused that.

@Larry - See JENKINS-14194. Look at the jenkins logs. When you access the configure page, the exception will tell you what plugin is misbehaving.

I got this with the Environment Injector Plugin

I could solve this (for now) by disabling the disk usage plugin. (Jenkins 1.524 with Disk usage 0.20)

i have Jenkins ver. 1.521 i solve the issue uninstalling Environment Injector Plugin

Decreasing the bug's severity. In any case, an improved analysis of the issue on Jenkins core side would be useful.

Comments indicate that most of the time, this issue is caused by different plugins (or in the interaction between core and plugins). Therefore I'm resolving this bug report against core, as there does not seem to be a specific fixable bug there.

However, it's clear that core needs an improvement to be more robust, given the number of related reports, watchers, and comments. I filed that improvement as JENKINS-25287.

Regarding specific plugins, consider filing a bug against the specific plugin, when disabling or uninstalling that plugin makes the problem go away (bonus: Does enabling it again make the problem appear?). Include as much diagnostic information as you're capable of gathering (browser script console errors, things you discover in the JS debugger, exact versions of plugins and Jenkins, ...) to assist the authors in resolving the problem.