I've said this before, espesially with the disavow tool and removing links in general.
If your site has a link penalty or another penalty, and that penalty is removed - it doesn't mean your rankings will return after the penalty is removed.
Think about it for a second...
You have a ton of links that is driving your Google rankings to the top results. Then Google notices something fishy about the links and applies a manual penalty to your site for the unnatural links. So you go about removing the links manually or via the disavow tool.
All you are doing is removing links that Google already to manual action on. Maybe your rankings will increase a bit but it likely will not increase to the levels before your penalty.
Why? Because your original rankings were based off of Google counting those links - now they won't because (1) Google caught them and/or (2) you removed them or disavowed them.
We have a case of this at Google Webmaster Help where one webmaster complained just about this. The response by one SEO was dead on:
In process of removing spam back links, you will lose some sort of weight age of links and trust factor in search engines. you need to improve your authority and build few related high quality back links. to make your website perform better.
Experienced SEOs understand this, new SEOs won't.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
