Hello Michael
To the first question - you don't need to do that. As you say, RHEL5 is supported; Converter goes a different path for unsupported distros.
To the second question - whether you prefer thin or thick provisioning is a matter of how you organize your datacenter, Converter has no preferences about that (it didn't have in the past either AFAIK). I don't understand what you mean by "basic storage", but I guess the answer would be the same :-)
To the third question - there is no need to remove hidden devices in order to have networking (btw this is true for Windows, too. Though there might have been some corner cases requiring manual intervention).
The issues with networking are:
- choose a NIC type supported both by the GOS and helper VM; e1000 should be fine.
- you can't assign static IP during conversion. However if the source machine is setup with static IP, it will be preserved
- some distro versions (e.g. SLES10) hard code the MAC address is network config files which results is destinations w/o networking (MAC addresses are not preserved during conversion). RHEL5 should be fine.
HTH
Plamen