Why do my spammy backlinks still appear on my Open Site Explorer page after removal?

[SOLVISTA]

I used the organic spam backlink removal tactic of emailing owners of sites of spam rank 7 or higher on my page.  It has been weeks since many of the harmful links were removed, yet they remain listed on my Open site Explorer page.  My fear is that somehow simply getting these links removed doesn't exempt me from the potential to be penalized by Google crawlers.  Does it take longer than a few weeks for these links to disappear from the Open Site Explorer, or is there something else I need to be doing? Any and all advice appreciated.

Ben

[LesleyPaone]

Open Site Explorer only updates once a month or so. You have to figure some delay in it. The last update currently was June 9th, the next is on July 21st. You also have to figure that between updates it is compiling data the whole time as well. So if you have a link that was removed July 1st, it could still show in the next update if Rogerbot crawled the link before July 1st.