At home I just use the standard Google home page. At work I use Yahoo since I get a little bit of random news each time I pull up my browser but after I glance at it I switch to Google if I’m searching for something.
I use Google Calendar. I don’t have any tabs auto-open when I open the browser, so I see the calendar once a day.
New tabs open to a blank page - well, now the page with the useless screen shots or whatever. Firefox’s answer to Chrome’s stupid screen shots. I gotta turn that off.
The reason is that it is incredibly simple to load(very few graphics) and the fact that I have used it as my homepage for, well, a really really long time.
I use excite.com. Like you and iGoogle, I have it customized just like I want it, so it’s very hard to think about changing. And somehow, Excite has managed to not go out of business yet.
I use a text file I wrote in hypertext markup language that has links to many of my favorite pages. Since it sits on my hard drive it is easy to load quickly.
Google News. I like getting the quick overviews of what’s happening around the world it provides, as well as the option to look more deeply at specific topics and stories.
I have iGoogle set as my home page, but I almost never actually go there. I have Chrome set to open whatever pages i was viewing when I closed it, so I only go to my ‘Home Page’ if I click on the toolbar button, which I rarely do.