Be sure not to have multiple VS instances open when making changes to your projects. Visual Studio has an annoying behavior with its settings. To be sure everything is working I recommend this steps:
Launch 1 VS
Make your changes
Close and reopen the start page to verify the changes
Restart VS to make VS write the settings to the disk/registry.
When I configure my solutions in the Favorites area they are not saved. When I reopen VS 2017 they are gone