When first opened the left sidebar shows a list of contacts/recent conversation, whilst the main pane shows a "How to make free voice and video calls" video, an advert for their Facebook integration, and a recent history of my contacts' status updates.
Is there a way to hide this main pane? It slows down the load time of Skype (particularly when there's a bad connection), and for me adds no value.
I'm running Skype v7.