At the top of my start page I have Facebook and Twitter and I would like to remove them.
I have tried clicking the "No thanks" links that appear below each and nothing changes.
I have also tried unchecking both items under the customize option and nothing changed.
Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks in advance.

I would very much like to remove these as well.

Count me in as well.

It is an issue with the portal and will be fixed in a future build.

ME TOO,I personally cant stand social networking,and am tired of them popping up

count me in

It's pretty logical that if people haven't logged in to certain services, they don't subscribe to them, or don't want to log in, so please remove the prompt to log in! It takes up valuable screen space.

I am happy for new services to appear here (as GMail did today), but if people choose to ignore them, remove the prompts (or at the very least, put them at the bottom of the screen).

I'm pretty sure that they did disappear for a while, but that may have just been my imagination.

A group of server-side fixes went into place about a week ago. I just checked and I'm no longer seeing this problem. Is anyone currently unable to click "no thanks" and have their choice "stick"?

I'm not sure what "no thanks" you're referring to.

My start page has: Update my status; Filter; Customize; Social; Edit share settings; News; Media; & My feeds.

I can't use any of these because I don't use social networking, "News" & "Media" are prescribed & can't be changed or deleted, & "My feeds," although entered by me, also can't be changed or deleted.

I'm interested in the Gmail option, but I can't login.

Prescribed & locked-in features are of very limited value. None of them are of interest to every user. I can only see the need for a start page if it's populated with frequently used bookmarks by the user, into folders created by the user.

It is true that, as you point out, the Skyfire start page is not completely customizable. This might be changed in a future release, but as of now it sounds like what you are observing is the way the browser should work. But all the items that appear after the (unchangable) things you mentioned are customizable: you can add or remove feeds as you wish.

For Gmail, make certain you have enabled IMAP in your Gmail account's settings. Let us know if that fixes the problem.