Hey everybody:
I have the solution to this problem.
I had installed Microsoft Office on my Mac at home recently, primarily to use Outlook on a day where I was working from home, and when I was done, I quit Outlook, but it was too late; the installation had left its residue. I got pop-up Windows which were related to Outlook telling me there were meetings, etc, so I wanted to find all running processes with "microsoft" somewhere in their path and to kill them off. These are the initial steps I took:
Tue 10:14:15 {jsl@marlin:[~]} pwd
/Users/jsl
Tue 10:14:27 {jsl@marlin:[~]} ps -ef | egrep -i 'microsoft|PPID' | egrep -v egrep
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
501 6036 313 0 10:11AM ?? 0:00.49 /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Office365Service.app/Contents/MacOS/Office365Service
501 6038 313 0 10:11AM ?? 0:00.65 /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Microsoft Database Daemon.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Database Daemon
501 6039 313 0 10:11AM ?? 0:00.45 /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/SyncServicesAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/SyncServicesAgent
Tue 10:14:49 {jsl@marlin:[~]} kill 6036 6038 6039
As you can see, I tried to kill off the 3 Microsoft-related processes, but when I went to double-check that I had actually gotten rid of them, I saw that 2 of them had come back:
Tue 10:15:05 {jsl@marlin:[~]} ps -ef | egrep -i 'microsoft|PPID' | egrep -v egrep
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
501 6104 313 0 10:15AM ?? 0:00.38 /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/SyncServicesAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/SyncServicesAgent
501 6105 313 0 10:15AM ?? 0:00.26 /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Microsoft Database Daemon.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Database Daemon
I kept trying to kill off various processes, but eventually I figured out that if I killed off every process except for the "SyncServicesAgent", I could at least keep the number of Microsoft-related processes to a minimum. But the real question was how to kill off the SyncServicesAgent so that it would stay dead? I noticed that "kill -9" didn't work, because the prcoess was definitely dying, but something else was bringing it back to life, and that's what I needed to suss out.
Let me just cut to the end, so that you, too, can know what steps to take. You want to kill off all "microsoft" processes except for "SyncServicesAgent" using "kill" on the command-line (in Terminal), and then use "launchctl" for the last step, as below:
Tue 10:30:44 {jsl@marlin:[~]} ps -ef | egrep -i 'microsoft|PPID' | egrep -v egrep
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
501 6104 313 0 10:15AM ?? 0:00.69 /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/SyncServicesAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/SyncServicesAgent
501 6105 313 0 10:15AM ?? 0:00.74 /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Microsoft Database Daemon.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Database Daemon
501 6158 313 0 10:30AM ?? 0:00.41 /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Office365Service.app/Contents/MacOS/Office365Service
Tue 10:31:09 {jsl@marlin:[~]} kill 6105 6158
Tue 10:31:24 {jsl@marlin:[~]} ps -ef | egrep -i 'microsoft|PPID' | egrep -v egrep
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
501 6104 313 0 10:15AM ?? 0:00.69 /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/SyncServicesAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/SyncServicesAgent
Tue 10:31:26 {jsl@marlin:[~]}launchctl list | wc -l
244
Tue 10:44:25 {jsl@marlin:[~]} launchctl list | egrep -i microsoft
- 0 com.microsoft.SyncServicesAgent.74304
6104 - com.microsoft.SyncServicesAgent
Tue 10:44:34 {jsl@marlin:[~]} launchctl remove com.microsoft.SyncServicesAgent
Tue 10:45:02 {jsl@marlin:[~]} ps -ef | egrep -i 'microsoft|PPID' | egrep -v egrep
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
Tue 10:45:22 {jsl@marlin:[~]}
Just to be clear, that last step -- and the step which everyone here is looking for -- is pretty much just
"launchctl remove com.microsoft.SyncServicesAgent", and the problem is taken care of. Cheers!