Disabling active checks on central host

I have a distributed monitoring setup that is working for the most part, but I noticed today there are a number of services that are on the central host (where all services should be passive) that have active checks enabled.
I’ve checked the config and all services have active_checks_enabled set to 0
I assume these particular services had been told at some point via the cgi to enable active checks, which seems to override the config, even after a restart.
Where can I find these manually overridden services? In status.dat?
Can I just delete status.dat and restart nagios and wipe all those out?
TIA

I think I answered my own question: its retention.dat that is the offending file here.
I ran a sed to change them all to passive and that seemed to work:
sed -i s/active_checks_enabled=1/active_checks_enabled=0/g retention.dat