I got my ati drivers workin today in the 2.6 kernel in suse 9.1 but now when ever i logout or press ctrl+alt+backspace the screen goes black with lines all through it. I have Wolfenstien ET workin for linux so games work so why does it freeze on restarting x?

Unfortunately the Radeon cards are not the best ones to use on Linux, although normally the dream card for gamers. I had similar problems with my SuSE 9.0 system and a Rageon 9500 card, plus it wouldn't support verbose.
My best suggestion for the moment is to go to the manufacturer's website and see if they have a Linux driver you can try or try this site http://mirror.ati.com/support/driver.html

i hope someone else on this site can give you some more tips, though...

I had (have) very similar probs with my Nvidia GF4 Ti4400 card and the only way I could seem to get past it was to pass the argument vga=normal to GRUB upon boot.

Basically, this disables that "fancy" frame buffer mode and your VT's only show up as ugly old text, but for me, it worked

This is clearly an issue with the "closed" source drivers for these video cards ... swine that they are

Now, weirdly, I'd like to suggest that this is maybe a SuSE problem. I've had the ATI drivers working under Mandrake 9.2, Slackware 9.1 and now Gentoo. While I freely admit that when I log out (using the Log Out applet in GNOME, or Exit in Openbox--I don't use CTRL-ALT-Backspace so much any more) that I do have display corruption while the X server is closing down and restarting GDM (I get a very pretty rainbow checkered/striped pattern on the top third of my screen, black on the lower 2 thirds), this only lasts a couple of seconds, then GDM comes up normally to allow me to choose "Log Out" from its menu (for some reason I apparenly don't have rights to log out directly from my desktop), and I have no display corruption when logging out, on either 1) the frame buffer consoles; 2) the silent bootsplash; or 3) the verbose bootsplash/frame buffer gained by hitting F2 when the silent bootsplash is running. The verbose bootsplash is of course the same as the framebuffer console with background, but I only mention it because it's a display change on-the-fly.

So if disabling fb works-- and I know that SuSE uses a bootsplash-- maybe the issue is not the ATI drivers per se, but bootsplash itself (which perhaps doesn't work properly with the ATI drivers, or SuSE has tweaked the bootsplash/frame buffer into conflict with said drivers).

Just a thought, hope it sheds some light.