Steve, I'm really sorry about this! I haven't seen that happen before; on my phone if the setting is disabled, it behaves the way you'd like.
If you contact us
via email, we'd be happy to look into this with you.
At the very least, we can work with you to try and reduce those sync times. Unless the network connection is very, very slow, having syncs take that long on a consistent basis means something out of the ordinary is happening.