Address Book: cannot delete contacts or stop syncing

I no longer use the Mac address book app., but I don't want to jettison it altogether in case I decide at some future date to use it again. It is full of contacts, and includes several groups that I created at the time when I did use it. All sorts of mysterious things keep happening: when I send e-mails out from my usual e-mail client (SeaMonkey, not the Mac Mail) to a group created in that e-mail client, the messages get sent to people I have deleted from the group — apparently because the contact is still there in the Address Book.
I have tried to delete all contacts and all groups from Address Book, but after a moment or two they all re-appear. How can I permanently delete them, and how can I prevent Address Book from syncing with other applications?
Thank you for any help.

I have not done the vCard bit because I do not want to keep the information from AB
That is just to have a safety Backup incase you need to restore it.
If I remove the folders you mentioned, would they be reconstituted if I opened AB again? Or should I keep them in a safe place?
No, to enable use in AB again you'd move the folders back to the original locations.
It looks to me as if the only safe thing to do is to leave the two folders where they are, but remove the AB application from my hard disk and keep it on a CD for possible re-introduction at a later date.
I doubt AB is doing this to SeaMonkey, it appears to me that SeaMonkey is looking in those AB folders itself for the info.
Is that a suggestion worth passing on to the software developers?
Honestly, I think that'd be the opposite of what 99.999% of people would expect/want, but...
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
PS. And there's no likelihood it would be changed in Tiger/10.4.x, as Apple is working on 10.7.x now.

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