I believe all the problems you are describing can be taken care of by
applying the latest service updates.  In the past when I would encounter
these problems the only solution was to stop and restart the server.  If you
are nervous about that just make sure you have a good db backup before you
experiment.  I remember seeing these problems come up when certain commands
like  q node was executed while expiration was running.  It would hang until
we restarted the server.

Jack