Had a case open with Microsoft, took several weeks to come to a conclusion actually. But, felt this might help someone, so I've posted the result.
Subjective:
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When you click on "Process Expired items now" in your production environment, the button becomes unusable (grayed out) and does not become usable until you remove the Timer Job Definition associated with the "Process Expired items now" button press.
Case Resolution Agreement:
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This case would be considered resolved and ready to close when the "Process Expired items now" button in your production environment becomes available after pressing it without having to delete the "Expiration Policy (manually initiated)" Timer Job.
Objective:
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MOSS 2007
Windows 2003
Assessment:
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I observed the behavior you were seeing in your production and your QA environments. In QA, the button works as expected, but in production the button remains grayed out after clicking it.
I did some research on this issue and found that we needed to "reactivate" the Records Management feature using the stsadm command below.
stsadm -o activatefeature -filename recordsmanagement\feature.xml -force
We successfully ran the above command on the production SharePoint Server, and tested the "Process Expired items now" button. This time, the button became available again on its own, without having to manually delete the "Expiration Policy (manually initiated)" Timer Job.
