I have 3 different versions of Amarok in my repos but every one is giving me grief.
Playing songs is ok but often when I do something like click on the artist tab and in particular do anything which opens a second window (such as preferences) the whole desktop hangs, I can't do anything in Amarok (though music is still playing), I can't click on any panel icons and keyboard shortcuts don't work and on many occasions it stays like this so long I end up having to do <alt><ctrl><backspace> (the only thing that does produce a response) to kill X and log in again.

Try uninstalling the following applications:

:~> rpm -qa | grep ama
amarok-libvisual-1.3.8-34
amarok-1.3.8-34
amarok-xine-1.3.8-34

Yours maybe different versions (ie. 1.4.1 etc).

Then re-installing them from the SuSE10.1 installation repo.

Check to see if it works, then update them from the backport or guru repo.

Well I tried that but it made no difference.