I have a feature class with no features in a map. It has many fields. If I open the table view, I can't see all the fields because they don't all fit in the dockable window. I can't scroll right the see the fields because there is no horizontal scrollbar. The horizontal scrollbar only shows up when there are rows in the table.
I have seen similar issues in the inability to scroll through fields in a table... my solution, just open another table, then switch back to the empty table... is the scroll bar active now? At least in arcmap, the table views sometimes need a kick by switcching between open tables to get 'stuff' to work. quirky? yes... but has worked for me