Last night I installed many patches since i had the SUSEWatcher automatically searching for updates.
I felt it would be a good idea to install these patches, thats why they're there right to improve your system...?

Well today I logged in as root only to be met by a YAST screen.
The only options available to me were for making configuration changes.
Hardware, software networking etc.
No where was there a place to launch a web browser, email apps, etc. Essentially the desktop for root was gone and replaced by this configuration page.
I did have search, help and close buttons available on the bottom of the screen.
After selecting close the system simply logs out and back to the sign in screen I go...
Doesnt make much sense.

Anyone else run into this?

No Ideas Gang...?
Dont make me call (and pay for) SuSE support.

Well, see the bright side of that: you should never, ever login as root and start the X-server. That's a huge security risk. Start YaST as a normal user, SuSE will prompt you for the root password. It's much safer doing this way.

YaST2 can be found on KDE's menu, under System if I remember it right. You should be able to start yast(ncurses) and yast2(gtk?) by the terminal too.

If you ever need to change setting with root permissions, simply open a terminal, type "su" and there you go. No need ever to start the X-server as root...

Has anyone came up with a solution for this problem? I logged on as root, now I have this problem.

There is a session type called Administrative. Change your session to KDE, Gnome, or whatever. And yes, it's better to log in as a regular user and su to root when you need to.

O.K. I have tried logging in as root and tried administration, with both, all I get is a YAST screen (no desktop) and if I close YAST, it logs off. How do I fix the root/admin desktop?

I think you may have misunderstood my reply. Click on the drop down box in the session manager and select KDE.

If you are using KDM and if something happened so that there is only one windows manager option, that being Administration Session, then locate the kdm config file: $KDEDIR/share/config/kdmrc

Change add ',kde' to the SessionTypes= line

SessionTypes

A comma-separated list of session arguments, usually used to select a particular window manager. Defaults to SessionTypes=kde,failsafe.

I use init level 3 so I couldn't locate a .kdmrc in my home dir or a kdmrc file anywhere else.

I received an email from Brent Christopherson, here is what he had to say. I have not yet tried this...

"Thanks for the response. Actually, I've managed to figure out what the problem was.
There is a file in /root (actually in every user's home directory) called .dmrc that should have the following information in it:

[Desktop]
Session=default

In my case, and I suspect yours, it got change to

[Desktop]
Session=Admin

I know what I did to cause it. I clicked on the Administrator button that comes up on the login menu when you switch screens and login another user. This sets the value so that YaST becomes the desktop. This would be fine except that on the SuSE personal edition, they decided to reduce the functionality and make it more difficult to run different desktops, so they removed the button from the login menu which would allow you to switch back to KDE.

Clearly this is an oversight on their part, but it's also so easy to rip the rug out from under your own feet that I really can't believe that this problem isn't fairly widely known. Maybe it is buried somewhere on the SuSE website, but I sure never found it. I just had to figure it out for myself.

Anyway, I thought you might like to know the answer just in case you ever do it to yourself."