Ok, so I am frustrated. Who would not be.

I am trying to setup dual boot Visat and Suse 10.2

I just bought an HP Presario F759
(1.9ghz,2Mb ram,120Gb disk)

came with Vista Premium Home...unfortunately

I did not do anything on the Vista, because wanted to install Suse on top of a fresh Vista.

I started with Disk 1 (of course) from the Suse 10.2 disks
and it asked me to accept or change partitions.

I thought (erroneously it looks like), that I could let it do the automatic partitioning by shrinking my Windows partition, using half for Suse (about 47Gb)
and half for Vista (about 47Gb)

it thought about it for awhile then complained with

cannot set type of partition /dev/sda6 to type 82
error code = 1012 or something similar

Then I thought I would try it again. But I first rebooted in Vista to see what it thought the disk space was. It saw 47Gb , so I it seems even though the previous Suse install failed Vista thought that the disk had been partitioned.

The I retried the Suse install it did not see the Windows 47Gb and showed 47Gb free for the Suse install. I was happy about this.

But then I became less happy, even sad, and perhaps even mad, because when I accepted this default partitioning scheme it did not say it was trying to resize windows but immediately came back with the same error :
"cannot set partion /sda/? to type 82"

Note : the "?" is because I do not remember the drive number, but it was different from the first failure (which probably had been assigned to Vista).

Can anyone please help me out ?

If it had only a Vista partition (i.e. no recovery or "media direct" partition), it is probably on an alignment only it knows about. This screws XP up as well.
Even M$oft admit they screwed up, but they try to imply XP is at fault - see this support note.

Best to delete the whole lot, do the partitioning from Linux (leaving space for Vista), then install Vista. It will use the "old" partitioning scheme if it's already in place.