Processes I don't love - GrooveMonitor.exe is not groovy

I'm in the process of cleaning up things on my desktop computer, and decided I'd figure out what the heck GrooveMonitor was, whether or not I needed it, and how to get rid of it if I didn't need it.

Turns out that GrooveMonitor is part of Groove:

Office Groove 2007 is a collaboration software program that helps teams work together dynamically and effectively, even if team members work for different organizations, work remotely, or work offline. Working in Groove workspaces saves time, increases productivity, and strengthens the quality of team deliverables. Office Groove 2007 is just one example of how the 2007 Microsoft Office system helps teams and organizations collaborate more effectively.

Uh...I'm not using my home computer copy of Office 2007 to collaborate with anybody. Sounds like groovemonitor.exe can go.

So I ended up at Simple Thoughts' page on GrooveMonitor.exe:

To remove GrooveMonitor from your machine you have to go to Control Panel and then select Add/Remove programs. GrooveMonitor is one of the displayed applications. Uninstall it from there. That should do it for any normal windows program.

Only one teeny problem. GrooveMonitor was not there for me to uninstall.

Simple Thoughts:

Not surprisingly Microsoft himself often violates this basic principle (which surprisingly would give you more control over their crappy [pardon my French] software), and GrooveMonitor will still load on startup.

But there's a solution:

You can however use msconfig to prevent it from coming up on Windows startup.

1. Go to Start menu and click Run
2. Type msconfig and press Enter.
3. Go to Startup tab and then uncheck any reference to "groovemonitor"
4. Reboot

This advice was pretty much echoed at some other sources, so I went ahead and did it, removing the offending GrooveMonitor and getting rid of one process. After reboot, Windows warned me that I had run msconfig. Unfortunately, a "No Duh" button was not available.

I also found another tip:

The easiest way to remove the Microsoft Groove Folder Synchronization is by uninstalling Microsoft Office Groove. That is the best and most secure way to deal with the entries of that Office module. All you need to do is go into the Windows Control Panel, select Add / Remove programs, click on the Change button in the Microsoft Office 2007 entry, select to add or remove components and to uncheck Groove when the list of components is displayed.

This will uninstall Microsoft Office Groove from the system.

So I did that. In retrospect, maybe I should have done that first, but some of the items that I read indicated that GrooveMonitor.com persisted even after all of Microsoft Office 2007 was de-installed entirely.