Back then I'll admit, I always clicked the little "x" to close him. It was very simple to do! I didn't think much of it and figured he was there for newbies and that was fine.
I wrote an internal webapp a couple jobs ago which used a JS-implemented Clippy to guide folks through maintenance tasks (ClippyJS on the front end, Python/Flask doing telnet commands on the backend. 😌 I actually got some positive feedback on that later on.