deleting KOffice = lost wifi
 

Deleted KOffice suite, and one result was loss of internet connection; all hot points available a moment earlier (3 or 4 of them) were suddenly unable to be found ("cannot find server"). Seems strange that an action on an office process should cut my network access. An anomaly, or to be expected due to close intergration of all thigs KDE?

There are bits of KOffice still being used for some of the desktop applets. It could be knetworkmanager and kinternet have dependencies which were removed. You could try reinstalling them them, and seeing what YaST tells you.

got wifi back
 

Thanks, did a more thorough rework of the network install and got it back; just too tightly integrated in spots.