The new Skype version has an annoying Skype Home button in the left menu bar. There seem to be solutions to remove it for Windows, but non for OS X Lion, as far as I can see.
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4S: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)
I don't know how to remove it, but I'd suggest getting an older version of Skype. I still use v2.8 where the interface is still minimalistic.
I just updated to the latest Skype version yesterday and came across the Home button annoyance. I downgraded back to my previous version via Time Machine since v5.5 doesn't seem to have any must-have features that I care about. In my case, the old version is 5.3.0.1093 and doesn't have a Home button.
And similarly for my iPad, I have avoided updating to Skype v3.6.1 because the only feature it said it is adding is banner ads. No thanks!