New to linux, ready to learn, but not sure how to continue.

I installed a dual boot WinXP/SuSE 9.2 on my Dell Inspiron 5160. The installation seemed to go fine, but once I rebooted after that finished, I can't get past the "welcome wallpaper" on the login screen. I am able to bring up a virutal consol via ctrl-alt-F1, but that is it. I have figured out a few things with the help of a very experienced linux person. He didn't have time to continue working to figure out the problem.

1. The login window does not show up because 'auto login' got checked during the installation (something I will definitely change once I figure out how to do that).
2. The log-file for the boot process does not show any major errors.

Ideas for solutions:
1. I've heard that the X sometimes has problems with the video card. I have an Nvidea card, so I'm less suspicious of that since I hear that Nvidea works better with X than ATI.
2. I believe that I choose KDE as the default desktop. I think the problem may lie in KDE configuration.
3. I've searched around in some of the basic directories (/etc, /bin, ...) but didn't find anything that jumped out at me.
4. I know of someone that got SuSE 8.x to work on a dell labtop. I was going to reinstall SuSE 8.x to see if that works, than upgrade from there if I found it necessary. I installed SuSE via ftp. Upon my attempt to reinstall wiht 8.x, the network card driver installation was fine, but I kept getting messages along the lines of "attempt to contact server failed." I followed the same procedure for installing via ftp before, and had no problem contacting the server.

Thanks in advance for any help.