[iMOTOR]

A "test drive" for microsoft office x came preloaded on my computer when I bought it, but have no need for it so I steered clear of launching any of the apps. The other day, an other application used entourage to open one of it's files. I closed entourage and thought nothing of it until I started hearing my hd tick at regular 1 second intervals when it should be at idle. I panicked and started backing up my files like mad. The ticking persisted for days until I decided to launch entourage and see what happens. Shure enough, the ticking stops when entourage is open.
I trided to delete the office x test drive but trash says it can not delete it because a daemon is currenty runing (yeah, no sh*t!)

How can I get office x off once and for all?

[meem]

I could be wrong ( I haven't used Entourage in quite a while) but I think entourage puts the deamon in your startup items when it first launches. This I believe so it can run reminders and check for mail even when its not open. Open system prefs then Accounts pane then under the startup items tab should list all those things. I cant remember what it's called but it should be Microsoft mail deamon or something like that. Just select it on the list and hit the minus sign at the bottom to delete it from the startup list. I think there is a way to do it in entourage but it involves turning off alot of default setting which are all over the place.

Hope I remembered correctly and it helps.

[CambAngst]

Generically, when you're facing a situation like this, you can always run the Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities/) and look for a process that's grabbing some CPU time when the system is otherwise idle. You essentially get the same benefit as the Unix top command without having to use the Terminal.

[Maflynn]

There's been a number of threads that have complained about the test drive. The consensus regarding the ticking is that its checking to see if the test drive expired, and it does that every couple of seconds - why I have no idea. I don't have the problem with the full version, or at least I haven't noticed it.

Mike