CRM 2011: when auditing is turned off, why do existing Audit records lose "New Value"?

Question

Not sure if this is by design (if so, would love to know why!) or if this is a bug.  Let's say I have auditing turned on for Accounts.  I change the phone number in the Main Phone field from 555-1111 to 555-5555, and an audit record is
created showing the Old Value (555-1111) and New Value (555-5555).  Great.  Now I turn off auditing. The system goes back to the audit record that had previously been created, and modifies it so that it shows the Old Value (555-1111),
and inserts an icon into the New Value field indicating auditing was turned off.  The tool tip for that icon states "Auditing was stopped and restarted.  The new values for the fields that changed during this period cannot be identified or recorded."
First of all (minor picky issue) auditing hasn't been turned back on yet, despite what the tool tip says (says the same thing whether or not auditing is turned back on).  But the real problem is
why the existing audit record's New Value would be removed... why would that happen?!?  We're talking about a historical update.  It really did change, and the system knew what it changed from/to, so why would the system remove that new value
from the audit record?  Logically I would expect that any changes made
while auditing is off would not be logged, and that once auditing is turned back on, Old/New values would correspond to whatever was/is in the system at the time that any new audit record is created, so there may be a disconnect between an older audit
record and a new one (old record's New Value not matching the new record's Old Value, because changes were made while auditing was off). And it's quite apparent when auditing is turned off, because an audit record is created stating "Auditing Disabled". 
Any ideas if there's a logical reason why it would do this, or if this is really a bug that Microsoft needs to fix?  We have a client with a business need to periodically turn off auditing while integration updates run between CRM and another system
(otherwise hundreds of thousands of unnecessary audit records would be created).  But if they're going to lose audit data every time they disable auditing, the auditing is worthless.

Answer 1

We wouldn't ever temporarily turn auditing off on purpose... it's happening when we import managed solutions.  We have vendors with managed solutions that contain system entities such as Contacts.  When importing their solution, it momentarily
turns auditing off on those entities.  The only evidence of this is audit records indicating "Entity Audit Stopped", and of course the loss of all the most  recent "new value" on all audit records.  The interesting (?) parts of this are:
1. When importing the managed solution, the recommended option to keep all existing customizations is selected.  I would think this would include the audit settings on the entity, but apparently not (sort of... see #2).
2. As soon as the managed solution is imported, in addition to creating an "Entity Audit Stopped" audit record on relevant entities and wiping out new values, it apparently turns auditing back on, yet there's no record of this (in customizations, the entity
still (or once again) indicates auditing is enabled; but on records for that entity, there is no "Entity Audit Enabled" record.   
So, now it's on to working with the vendors, to dig into their managed solutions and see if there's a way to prevent this!