After doing some testing with 1.08 Exp on my own server, I noticed the next day that all of the loot in the surrounding buildings was the same as the previous day.
I wondered if perhaps this was a problem with my configuration or perhaps the new modded mission file capability (which I was testing).
So I deployed a new, completely vanilla instance of 1.08 Exp, logged in with a new character, dropped my jeans (jeans_bluedark - vanilla lifetime of 300s), and logged out.
I logged back in 30 minutes later and the jeans were still there. Is it possible there is a bug in 1.08 that is causing items to ignore their lifetime values?