I'm using 2.4 and I'm trying to delete the News Forum. I have gone into 'Course Default Settings' and set 'News items to show' to '0' and the tried to delete it. But I can't get rid of it; it always appears.
See the doc here http://docs.moodle.org/23/en/News_forum
You need to make sure that the Latest News Block is deleted from the course. If not it will keep recreating it.