hmmm, well after a couple of days of screwing around with this I finally figured out what the issue was, it would of been good if someone knew the answer already and the above link wasn't exactly explanatory. To make sure noone goes through the same pain in finding the solution I'll explain it in this forum and hopefully google or whatever will be smart enough to pick it up someday.
The bad magic error has nothing to do with the smart package manager itself but the fact that suse cannot use delta rpms(small update files, google it) to install updates or any packages from. In using the guru version of smart, as most of you would be I didn't put any form of priority on certain servers (as alot of you wouldnt either) and recieved delta or otherwise corrupt rpms from third party sources. The packages that were downloaded like this gave back a bad magic error.
What you need to do is delete any update rpms that dont work and redownload them via the primary update channel(from the suse ftp) or any other channel you know works perfect; do this by either putting a priority on these channels or disabling any other channels and downloading it, try installing the package then, it should work fine.
This may seem like something trivial to some but it had me banging my head against a brick wall trying to sort it out; but then I guess I'm a newbie.