How to really disable My Sites on MOSS 2007

So, I have been modifying a MOSS site. One thing I was trying to do is disable the My Site / personal site completely. There are links on the web on how to disable it here, here and like 10,000 other places. They all say the same thing.

Well that is all fine and dandy if you want to just hide the UI. However, if you are also doing custom profile fields that require the user to have a profile in the central admin the above way doesn't work, doh! When you add a profile in the central admin and then you go view the user's information on a specific web application it gives you the MySite. I said I didn't want that!

I finally found the solution and I thought I would blog about it in case it could help someone else.

What you have to do is go disable the actual MySite feature. To do this Navigate to the bin folder that has stsadm.exe in it (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN in my case) and then fire off the following command.

stsadm.exe -o deactivatefeature -name MySite

After that the MySite feature is disabled and life is good.

For an extra tidbit the file MySiteFeatureElements.xml had an ASPX control that is for redirection which was the thing causing me my grief.