If anyone had issues with "locked clock" speeds, I figured out what was causing mine.  One of my rigs has 4x 290x cards in it.  MSI afterburner recently expired, so I upgraded to the latest beta.  This upgrade didn't keep the "enable unofficial overclocking" setting to whatever you had it before.  I re-enabled it, bam, I can change core/mem clock speeds and not have my cards crash at the defaults.