SEO Links Enabled turned off is not working

Right, I am trying to change how urls look as to be honest the default ones are quite ugly. While for the most part it is cosmetic, some of us would prefer for our stores not to look like an out of the box system and for the sake of SEO practices, c-1-string-c2-string/prod-c1-id-23 doesn't help.

Anyway. I have turned off "SEO Links enabled" (which shows now as false). However all category and product urls are still being written as SEO urls. If I try to access a category via index.php/category?category_id=1 it redirects me to the SEO version of that page (eg: catname-c-1). 

I have cleared the sites cache and my browsers cache and this keeps happening.

Anything appreciated.