Associated products listing

The associated product listing modules display the products on your website front end categories listing menus.
You can remove them, but you won't see your products anymore. I don't see why you would want to do that ?

You don't want to unpublish it.
You probably just want to change the "sub element filter" option of the module to "direct sub elements" so that it only display products when they are directly linked to the categories.

If you remove the module, you won't see any product at all when you click on the categories, that's why the system is telling you that it's not OK.

The "sub element filter" option of the module can be found in the hikashop options page of your module that you can open via the menu Display>Content modules.