Man, I haven\'t used my CF protector ever I don\'t think!
I would think the power drain is quite minimal, as long as you\'re not reading/witing to the card, so my vote is to replace it with a CF memory card.
If you want to make sure that the card is not a memory drain, I would think that disabling the CF card (cardctl commands) or disabling PCMCIA (/etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia) would take care of it.