Ahh, OK. I see now. Now the next task is to figure out why I was NOT seeing it, but it's likely because I was using border sizes greater than 1.
I have not bought a license yet. Could that be part of it?
No, evaluation mode is not crippled in any way.
To avoid this issue, you may need to increase your border size. You may notice that on some borders, a size of 2 will actually render with a size of 1. More specifically, some borders will render at 1 pixel size smaller than specified. Explanation below.
Regarding the values not "sticking". The border Size input does not represent the value of the border size, because it can't, as there are 4 borders and only 1 input, and the borders may all be a different size. It is there to
assign a size to a border, along with type and color. When you open the Border window, the Size field defaults to the size of the first side that has a border, starting with top, then right, bottom, and left. So if your top border size is 3, when you open the Border window the Size field will be preset to 3. If your top border size is 0 (no border) and your right border size is 2, when you open the Border window the Size field will be preset to 2. If no sides have borders, Size will default to 1. You should be able to see from the illustration that your border sizes were retained, but the Size input will set to a value previously described.
So why do some borders render a pixel smaller? Technically they don't, they render the correct size, but some of the background color of the cell may render a little over the border making the border look smaller. The reason for this is a bug in Chromium. When I modernized the TD (version 3.7) I was able to finally ditch Internet Explorer as the rendering engine and moved to Electron, which uses Chromium as its rendering engine. Chromium is the rendering engine used in Google's Chrome browser (as well as others, such as Microsoft's Edge browser). This was a huge leap forward and long overdue, and allows one to create much more modern layouts, using all the great stuff that has been added to HTML and CSS specifications over the years. This also required a LOT of tweaking of TD code and rendering to keep it somewhat backwards compatible. I did the best I could and for the most part layouts that worked in previous versions still look the same or similar in version 3.7. While doing this, I discovered a rendering bug in Chromium. Part of the rendering of a layout uses scaling, and in IE the only way to scale was to use the CSS "zoom" attribute. This is a non-standard, Internet Explorer only feature, although other browsers did adopt it unofficially (it works in Chrome and Firefox, for example). But being non-standard, it could go away at any time, and there are better ways to do it in modern browsers, and better often means it will render more accurately and faster, making the TD more efficient and run faster. So I moved from using zoom to using modern CSS attributes to achieve the same effect. This is where I discovered the bug. Here's a rendering I made when working on a way around this bug that illustrates the issue:
On the left is the "Regular size" of a rendering of 6 elements, arranged in a grid, using 3 different ways to layout elements. The second column is the same but scaled a little smaller using the "correct" way to scale it. Tiny but noticeable lines appear between the elements. That's the bug. The third column is using the "old" way (zoom). It looks fine, but again this is the old way and isn't as efficient and could go away at any time. The final column is the same as the 2nd, the "correct" way, but with a workaround I applied. The workaround is to shadow the background a little around some edges in order to "paint" over the lines that appear due to the bug. It works, but the side effect is it can paint over a little of the border. At the time I figured this was a worthwhile tradeoff, because surely Google would fix this bug soon. Alas they have not. But the workaround to the workaround is usually to just increase the border size where you see an issue.
I hope this helps workaround what has probably been a frustrating issue.