Looks like I spoke too soon: What I saw was an isolated case of lightboxoff not displaying when I turned off automatic lightbox. Apologies!
I’m having the same issue, and looks like the most direct way to ‘turn off’ the lightboxoff custom field is by disabling ‘auto-lightbox’ in settings >> lightbox.
The down side here is (as it says) “Automatically add rel=’lightbox[post-ID]’ to images in posts. All images in a post are grouped into a lightbox set.”
If either of you find a more elegant solution allowing for automatic to be checked, and yet still getting rid of the ‘lightboxoff’ custom field please do let me know.