Changing regions name causes blocks to dissapear

In the .info file if you have a region named region1 and put a block (for example the navigation block) inside it and then change the name of the region from regions[region1] to regions[region 2] the navigation block dissapears from the blocks page and is not reasignable.

I believe it stays in region1 but region1 is nolonger viewable so you can not move it somewhere else. In other words you have to make sure that any region name you are going to change is empty or you will nolonger have access to the blocks that were in that region as they will not be listed as disabled.

I was not expecting any behavior but it would be nice if the block was listed as disabled instead so it could be reasigned.