Ben--
Echoing Alex B here, DO NOT Normalize. It is a permanent and irreversable change to your files. Instead, use replay gain, and join the ongoing argument if you wish as to the correct Replay Gain level, happy that Replay Gain can be changed at any time.
I originally ripped my collection to WAV. Over the last year I have converted it all to FLAC. For me, the motivation was primarily the enhanced tagging (over WAV) as well as disk space. FLAC in particular of the lossless formats has a low CPU burden on playback.
In analyzing the quality settings, scthom chose 6 as the default because he noticed a dramatic giveback in CPU effort in decoding 7 or 8, while the additional space savings was tiny. My recommendation: use 6. Quicker to encode, easier to decode.
As to verify, I check it but I've never referred to it later. I'm not sure what would happen if verify found an error, that's a question for scthom. It takes about 30% longer to use it, but why not.
If I understand padding blocks, this is to create a consistent file size for tagging, so that tagging changes don't change file size. I think. It mght be something else completely, but I check it and so far nothing has exploded.
Personally, I would rip, then encode. This is how I did it, and I liked the idea that I was looking things over every step of the way. IMO, there is a lot of spooky voodoo involved in accessing the CD, and no matter how fast CPUs get, optical disk technology figures out a way to punish us for hoping for the best. So I rip first, look it over, then encode to FLAC.
Good luck. Make sure that you have the latest FLAC encoderf/decoder, available in the third party plugins area.