Well, Intel documented that the very first instruction after enabling protected mode had to be an "intra-segment" (not inter-segment) jump, to flush the prefetch queue. At least that was what it said in the 286 and 386 documents I read. You were supposed to set up everything else needed before that, do this near jump, and then jump to the new protected mode code segment.

Some later documentation contradicted this, saying that instead this first jump had to be to the protected mode segment.

From the patent (US4442484), it is apparent that the processor decodes opcodes into a microcode entry point before they are executed, and the PE bit is one of the inputs for the entry point PLA. So that would be the obvious reason for flushing the prefetch queue - but it turns out that at least on the 80286, most instructions go to the same entry point regardless of the mode they are decoded in. So they should work the same without flushing the queue.

And yet for some reason, what I've seen in my experiments is that the system would reset if there were three instructions following the "LMSW" without a jump. Even something harmless like "NOP" or "MOV AX,AX", that couldn't be different between real and protected mode. Maybe there is some clock phase where the PE bit changing during the decoding of an instruction leads to an invalid entry point, that either causes a triple fault or resets the processor?