Comment 6 for bug 1183730

Katie, I think you have misunderstood the problem from a usability point of view. The point is that in the case of an online account login error that is not the user's fault -- e.g. the cited Facebook problem -- Ubuntu will keep trying to log the user in and/or request new access details. This in turn may have very intrusive side-effects for the user (e.g. in the case of the Facebook problem, a new browser tab would be opened every few minutes).

In such circumstances it's essential to explicitly disable, and not remove the account -- in order to prevent the account from continually trying to log in. But there is no way to do this from the GUI, only the command-line procedure outlined by Alberto.