There are a few things that could be going on. My guess is that you either have a dogdy library setup or you have set the filter options in cvpcb in such a way that it does not work.
If you had version 4 installed in the past then i would assume your footprint library is still setup with version 4 libs but the symbol lib is from version 5. Check this first!! Read this FAQ entry for a more detailed explanation: I had KiCad 4 installed previosly. Now i updated to v5. Now i have some problems with the library setup
If my guess about the library setup is not what is at play here then you might want to take a look at this FAQ post. It might just be that there is a misunderstanding of how cvpcb works: How can i assign a footprint to a symbol?