Just found this easy solution to hide the left navigation panel in sharepoint
The left navigation bar makes the page looks very “SharePoint”. And, some valuable space is wasted under it. If you don’t want to customize the Master page (or want to keep the left nav panel in the rest of the site), you can just hide it on the home page. Insert a Content Editor webpart, and edit the source by clicking the “Source Editor…” button, and enter this:
.ms-navframe{ display:none; }
That’s right, this is just to override the default style for that section.
All About SharePoint 
It did not work in the Content editor for me.
But entered into my style.css it worked.
Nice idea anyway.
In MOSS 2007 I also had to override .leftNavSpacer to be display:none as well, but inserting the following into my page header in SP Designer worked great. Thanks for the idea!
.ms-navframe, .leftNavSpacer { display:none; }I want to hide the left panel on my main master page but keep it on my other master page which will be used throughout my subsite, how would I do this?