After poking around a little more I have discovered that my biggest problem was that I was searching for 'lib *L* math' not 'lib *i* math'.
* Imath implements 2D and 3D vectors, 3x3 and 4x4 matrices,
quaternions and other useful 2D and 3D math functions.
I added the following repo and attempted to install OpenEXR.
http://download.opensuse.org/reposit.../openSUSE_10.3
This started a new round a dependency problems, specifically that KDE 4.0 is listed as requiring libIlmImf.so.6 while KDE 3.5.7 requires libIlmImf.so.4.
yippy