What happens when you unprotect an account?

There is documentation on what happens if you turn on protection for your account. But what happens when you remove it? For example, I have a large list of follower requests which require approval on the protected account. Will they all become followers of the new account, or will the list of requests stick around? What happens if I re-protect later?

My current followers can see the archive of my protected tweets. Presumably the public and the new followers will only see the tweets after I unprotect, is this true? What about the people above, if they do indeed auto-follow? What if I approve them all before unprotecting? If they don't auto-approve, what else can I do?

In general, an article in the help system about turning off protection (and turning it back on if it was once off) would be a good compliment to the article about turning on protection.