Historically, you could select an object in the layer manager even if it was frozen. This allowed you to edit it's properties in the Modify Panel without unfreezing it.
What this affects:
1) Modifying objects
2) Getting Object Properties
3) Selecting groups of objects for various actions
Now the answer is currently to Unfreeze, then freeze again. However, this removes various efficient methods previously available.
For example, say your scene has thousands of objects, of which hundreds are arbitrarily frozen. You may want to select a subset of objects (some frozen and some not) via the scene explorer so that you can add them to a selection set, delete them, add a modifier, add a material... etc etc. Previously, you could do this inside the layer manager easily. Now, you have many added steps (and wasted time if you already ran your query in the scene explorer).
Submitting a bug report. Maybe you should too 🙂
Thank you for submitting the bug report. Please post back here or private message the case number you receive so I can track internally. Thank you.
The bug report: BSPR-15897 Select Frozen objects in Scene Explorer is Broken