For those users who find SuSE 9.1 (and maybe other versions) to be a PITA this may be for you. I am fairly new to this distro and recently installed it along with Mandrake 10.0. Anyway for me SuSE9.1 ran like a fly trying to walk through a barrel of treacle, wearing a pair of hob-nailed boots. I read a thread elsewhere in LQ about someone unplugging their network cable and things began to work as normal. This gave me a starting to point (thanks for that!).

I found that by stopping the network service :

/etc/rc.d/network stop

I was able to get KDE going again but starting it again caused things to grind to a halt.

I fumbled around in YaST for a bit and found that if you select Network Services -> DNS and Host Name and untick "Change host name via dhcp" , things might start to pick up. I also changed the Hostname from "Linux" to my preferred name. I modified /etc/hosts and added my machine:

192.168.0.3(or your NIC address) my_hostname

After doing this I found that I couldn't get any apps to open. So I restarted X (ctrl-alt-del) and logged-in again. I had to restart the network (as I had previously turned it off) and presto! All was back to normal.

I hope this helps some of you guys.