[geckoday]

Look at skin1/customer/home_main.tpl and skin1/common_templates.tpl to see how x-cart decides which template to include within skin1/customer/home.tpl. Then you can do one of two things.

In skin1/customer/home.tpl you can use {if} {/if} smarty tags to exclude the left column in certain areas of the site. For example, I turn off the left column on my site in checkout using this right before the <td> tage that starts the left column:

 {if $main ne "checkout" and $main ne "anonymous_checkout"}

and {/if} right before the <td> tag that starts the center column.

Or if your changes are more extensive you can use an {if} right at the beginning of home.tpl with something like this at the end.

{else}
{include file="customer/homespecial.tpl"}
{/if}

Then you can make a copy of home.tpl to create homespecial.tpl and hack it to your hearts content.