imagent constantly sucking network bandwidth, won't die Since installing Mountain Lion and configuring Messages, I've noticed a trickle of network activity that is basically constant.

I installed Little Snitch and discovered that a process called "imagent" is connecting to my work Jabber server, pushing about 45Kb/s up and pulling about 75Kb/s down. Research seems to indicate that imagent has something to do with chat or Facetime availability.

Killing imagent stops it momentarily, but it relaunches itself almost immediately. Logging Messages out from the Jabber server stops it entirely.

I'd like this not to be doing this. Google doesn't seem to know anything about it, though it does show various other problems people have had regarding imagent being hoggish about memory and disk space. Activity Monitor does show it running between 9% and 12% of the CPU, which seems a bit much for a background process. No idea whether it's eating disk space too. A previous question here talks about memory usage by it, which I don't seem to have a problem with.

How do I stop this crazy thing?
launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.imagent.plist


.. this WILL break your ichat/messages application though, so to put it back do: 

launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.imagent.plist