I know that home page is a special case in internal linking because of so much of the PageRank in your site will flow into the homepage. So, what would you do to reduce the number of unnecessary links on your home page?
i would link the main category page and 2-3 important category pages from home page. Rest of the pages could be found on the category page.
Is it possible to combine multiple pages such as privacy, terms of use, disclaimers, contact into a single page and provide just one link to that page using named anchors?
I will suggest you 2 ways: 1. Create Pop-Up windows for your Privacy policy, terms of Use and Disclaimer and a Contact US page. OR 2. Create separate pages and use "nofollow" tag that way you could preserve the link juice.
Just add rel=nofollow tag. For eg if your page URL is privacy-policy.html then wherever you are assdding link for the page, go the following way: <a href="http://www.domain.com/privacy-policy.html" rel="nofollow">Privacy Policy</a>
Create a sitemap page and link to that page from home. The sitemap itself will link to all other pages. This way PR value will be up and crawler will also find its way to the rest of the site through sitemap page..