I start new projects by writing a child theme for the twentyeleven theme. I rarely design the new theme to use any of the options built into the twentyeleven theme (such as background color, etc). Those residual options don't really hurt anything, but I'd like to get rid of them since they don't do anything. 

The trouble is that the theme options are declared in the parent theme's functions.php, which is loaded along with (not instead of) the child theme's functions.php file (so I could delete them but they'll come back next upgrade). 

Is there a way to remove or disable those theme options from my child theme? Perhaps something along the lines of a "remove\_options()" function? Or perhaps something that would achieve that effect? In other words, **the question is whether theme\_options can be removed WITHOUT deleting/overriding the original function that added them.**

I'm sure with enough puttering, I could hide the option with CSS or javascript... but c'mon.