Whenever I am worried about a file and I want to remove it's ability to function without deleting it I leave it in place and rename it to file.<whatever the ext was>.hold. Restart the box and check the functionaility. If it works, fine... I leave it where it is as a .hold file. Every few months I'll search the disk for *.hold and decide whether I should delete them or not - it depends on the app and how often and "deeply" I use it.

It works perfectly for me.... never broke an app yet this way....