I just installed OpenSUSE 11.3 on my mother's laptop. She primarily uses it to watch TV on hulu. This is a problem because Flash isn't working in Firefox. Flash works in Opera, but shockwave does not. My niece uses the computer for games sometimes so I need that to work too.

Youtube just has a big black rectangle. Hulu occasionally give me a message which says I need to install the updated version of flash, but usually it just has a big black rectangle. I have the most up to date flash plugin installed and cannot figure this out.

From aboutlugins

Shockwave Flash

File: npwrapper.libflashplayer.so
Version:
Shockwave Flash 10.1 r102

MIME Type Description Suffixes Enabled
application/x-shockwave-flash Shockwave Flash swf Yes
application/futuresplash FutureSplash Player spl Yes

Is your Suse 11.3 a 64bit install?
You don't need npwrapper.libflashplayer.so when you use the proper 32/64bit version matching your OS and browser,
but you surely need (a link to) libflashplayer.so - run "file" on the original executable to see if 32/64bits - in the (link to) plugins folder
of your firefox install. Usually the plugins reside in /usr/lib(64)/mozilla/plugins.
For 64bit linux, use the square-player beta from labs.adobe.com.