Easel doesn't provide layers, so I think your best bet, short of deleting the object, would be to move it below the ground plane or whatever terrains are in your scene. As for deleting something, save the scene before and after the delete and it provides a way back (not an ideal solution, but using Easel often requires these kinds of work arounds).

To add a small caveat to this discussion, Vue will only use all cores if you are using Vue 6 Infinite or xStream. The other versions are locked to using just 2 cores.

I am not sure about hypervue and older versions of OS X, but I have been able to render animations to TIFFs using hypervue and rendercows across several Macs (Macbook Pros and Macbooks) running 10.5 with no problems.

Go for widescreen and get the biggest monitor you can afford. Personally, I like 24" because they can handle 1080p resolution.

The 1440x900 is a fine resolution for Vue, however, bigger is always better and some of the Samsung monitors (I have a 22" Samsung 2253 BW) are fairly cheep. I picked mine up for less then $300 Australian. They are probably even cheaper in the States.