Hello to all.
I have a series of issues that are preventing a permanent switch to Linux, something I am working to and hope to be able to do with the help of kind people here.
I'll post these various issues in different parts of the forum, where they are relevant. In each case I am talking about the same machine, a 2ghz/512ram Dell Inspiron 2650 with Suse 10.2 installed with updates.
Please help me ditch Windows permanently and get my Linux install stable and settled. (Please search for my other posts under the username Ceviche)

Yast problems
There are times when opening Yast screws up my session and I have to restart the machine.
I'll open Yast and type the root password. Rather than opening the Yast interface instantly, you see it thinking for about 2 or 3 seconds longer, before it tells me the password was incorrect.
When this happens, the system becomes unusable. I get an io-slave error for every disk, preventing me from loading or saving documents, the user manager doesn't work – I can no longer login as root, or any other user in the terminal. Without disk access or the ability to become root... I am dead in the water.
I now open and use Yast very carefully. I don't switch desktops and I close other apps first. This makes the problem much more unlikely to occur – but this is not really good enough.

It sounds like a great security block to me. You are not supposed to be able to work as "root" without the right password. When you open YaST is the same as working terminal (konsole) as "root".

But I don't enter the wrong password.
I don't open YaST in the same terminal.

Crashing my system, spraying me with errors, blocking access to all drives and forcing me to restart - all after entering the correct password sounds to me that a terrible security block to me.

I'm sorry but I understood that you were miss spelling the password. I can not help you beyond this point unless I do a bunch of guessing. I think the main question would be did this start from the beginning of the installation or after trying to configure with adding or changing programs.

No problems in a new 10.3 install.