The TSR acronym, which stands for "Terminate and Stay Resident," comes from a specific MSDOS system call. The general effect was often that, while that people would *think* they were closing or disabling a program, it would continue running in the background. This is my experience with Google Desktop on OSX, as evident in this screenshot.

Before I rebooted, I disabled it in my system preferences and it didn't shut down. I issued a kill command and it restarted itself. I rebooted my computer and there it is. Whatever the rationale behind this persistence, it is unintuitive and annoying, so I uninstalled it.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/174/459000120_1238256e86_o.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate_and_Stay_Resident

Hmmm... I definately wouldn't be happy running Deskyop under those conditions. I uninstalled it on my windows PC because of the memory it was taking up. My computer was so slow.

"Google Desktop is designed to run continuously in the background, and you will not be able to find items that you receive or view while Google Desktop is not running."

I don't need Google searching my computer. I use the UNIX `locate' command. What GDS is really convenient for on OSX is searching Google.com. You just push ⌘-⌘, type your query and push enter. Voila, It opens a new tab for you in Firefox. It's the fastest way to Google that I have experienced. A program that "runs continuously in the background" is Eeeeevil!