Edit node property causes deselection?

Yes, but I didn't implement the property change listener. 
I added PropertyChangeSupport to allow @ConvertAsJavaBean to work, persisting the object to xml when changed and reloading it. 
It's a netbeans platform feature of the settings api...

I could implement it manually probably, just drop the annotation and serialize the objects manually on change without reading them back.
And only read them on start up or module load...

But it would have been a neat feature, had it worked as expected.