Did you disable them for this plugin only?
We were able to disable it (without breaking other wordpress functionality or removing other needed libraries) by just commented out a single line in the class-pointers.php file - and it stopped the "pointer" from loading.
wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/admin/class-pointers.php
Screenshot: http://www.screencast.com/t/CWs32lhBpWcV
But that's not a solution - editing plugin files is always a bad solution, because on the next plugin update, this file will be overwritten, and you'll have to edit it AGAIN. And WordPress SEO is updated almost daily. :-)
@Yoast - PLEASE fix this bug that so many people are seeing. :-)
I love this plugin but currently can't use it for our blog hosting site (multisite environment) because of this issue.