Finder All My Files reorg or remove

In Lion Finder opens with All My Files. Is there a way to tunrn off or change this section so it does not show in both the side bar and in the right column, and so Finder does not open to this section? I tried to do this in Finder Preferences but that just makes "All My Files" to not be listed in the Side Bar. All the files still appear in the right column. The reason I find this feature not helpful is that you must scroll down through thousands of image files to get to PDF Documents (another thousand or so), then Movies, Presentations, Developer, Spreadsheets, and finally Documents of all types (doc, docx, xml, txt, etc.

A list of most recently used files would be more useful, but that seems to have disappeared.