It happened to me also, I had a site which I was not working on I had left it for many months, one day I noticed that it has got a PR3. So I started working on it and promoting it. After a HUGE promotion on this last google PR update it lost the PR and went down to PR2 I think google don't like promoting sites, it like us to work more on content not on promotion.
Same here, one old site went from grey to pr3 and another went from 0 to pr4. And I've never cared about these sites.
Suprisingly my this website, has PR 2 - one of the 5 backlinks is from my other website. And this one with soooooo much effort and sooooo many backlinks is PR 3