How to disable 'promote to front page' and 'sticky' options?
There are 3 places, where those options can be seen:


on admin/structure/types/manage/article, for the "Article" content type  


on node/2/edit, for the node with ID equal to 2  


on admin/content, between the "Update options"  




If you need to remove the options from those setting/administrative pages, then you need to alter the following form builders:


node_type_form()
node_form()
node_admin_nodes()


node_admin_nodes() is the form builder for the node administration overview in admin/content, which includes the "Update options" field that allows the users with the right permission to promote/demote a node from the front page, and to make a node sticky. The field lists all the node operations implemented by modules; in the list of the operations obtained with $operations = module_invoke_all('node_operations'), those operations are represented from $operations['promote'], $operations['demote'], $operations['sticky'], and $operations['unsticky'].