I’ve been using www.myway.com for a number of years. It’s very configurable and there are no banner ads or pop-ups…
Count me in as another who uses google as my start page. When I go to the internet, I either know where I am going, and either type it in the address bar or use a bookmark, or I want to search for something.
Oh boy, oh boy, I get to be the first to suggest it.
While my homepage was about:blank for years, and recently has been gmail.google.com, I will suggest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage for the knowledge-minded at heart.
Another vote for google. 
The Astronomy Picture of the Day, of course!
I use Google for mine, but I think I will go back to what I did before, and that is a homebaked start page of my own HTML that sits on my C drive. It will simply have several large links for the sites I normally go to: Google, a couple of news sites, the SDMB, and a couple of other message boards. Below that, will be a lot more links for sites I go to often, but not daily.
In essence, it will have a slightly cluttered late 1990’s portal look to it. This may look tacky, but it will be my portal, and not what some website thinks I want (even if they have let me customise it a bit). After a day or two of using it, it will be second nature. Really, having done this before on my old computer, I was hooked.
Wow. You are my hero. If I had a gold sticker to give, you would so get it.
Thanks for all the suggestions. I’ve changed my home page to Google, Yahoo, SDMB, and BBCNews: All in tabs and Hooray for Firefox, even though my darling Marcie is confused by it all. I fear she will continue to use IE when I’m not looking.
Hardly. Besides, there is a difference between doing something stupid and being stupid. I have also found that having a start page is kind of stupid because I too frequently get hung up if it is running slow. So I have a blank page and I don’t have to put up with the hassle. If there is a page that I wish to visit frequently or right off the bat, then I put it at the top of my bookmarks or I just remember an easy address; e.g. the yahoo email page or the Straight Dope.