It sounds like you have a GUI with a .m file and an associated .fig file. When you call openfig() it opens the figure from the .fig file, which will have basically an empty figure just like if you created it in GUIDE. However apparently it's not running any code from the m-file when you do that. To run that code you'd have to call the fig file by name in a line of code and pass it any input arguments it needs. That way it will run the m-file. For example, if you have myGui.fig and myGui.m, don't do this:
openfig('myGui.fig'); % Don't do this!
do this instead
myGui(); % Just call it by name which will run its m-file code