Jim, I have installed RH ES3 on a *ell Optiplex GX260 under vmware it seems to work nicely. I don't know if it was the host system that finds everything and transfers it to the virtual machine usb flash drives worked each time you plugged one in. The only problem is that the Kernel delays the boot process when it only finds only 128 Mb of RAM. (mind you this is server that I am talking about)
The GUI works I don't use KDE, but Gnome works fine. I didn't see KDE when I built a RHES3 on a ML370, I don't think I saw a mention of KDE at all. So your hypothesis may be correct. Go to Debian it rocks it has a bit of a learning curve compared to the other distros, it has a text based install process. Kevin -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
