I'm writing some utilities to manage site collections in a farm and
everything seems hunky-dory until site collection locks come into play. For
now, I'm trying to pay very close attention to sites that could be locked,
unlock them, do my business and reset the locks back to the way they were.
While this usually works it seems clunky at best. Is there a better way
that I should be doing this?

Also I've noticed that there appears to be some caching being done such that
changing the lock status doesn't always get set in the new instances of
SPSite that represent the same site collection.

Any similar experience or thoughts around this?