I've been using Suse for about 3 days and I must say I've had more problems than with any of the other dozen or so distros I've tried.
Thankfully, with the help of my good friend mr google, I've fixed most of them but I have a few that I can't get sorted. Hopefully, someone here can help.

1. When running Nautilus as a regular user in Gnome, it is slow to the point of being unusable. Everything from opening folders to opening the right-click menu takes an age for anything to happen. It runs perfectly fine as root user and it also works fine as regular user from within KDE. I am running it in no desktop mode.

2. I have set kdm to allow passwordless logins but when I try to login with the specified user I get login failed and I have to enter the password. I've tried setting it in the login manager settings in KDE's control centre, via sysconfig editor in YaST and also manually.
Setting passwordless logins in gdm is long a bit long winded so I'd rather use kdm.

3. When running Firefox in KDE, the toolbar and menu fonts are HUGE, about twice as big as in other apps. All other gtk and kde apps have normal sized fonts and Firefox has normal size fonts when run in Gnome. I've tried removing gtk-qt and the files it produces and I've tried it with the gtk-qt config files I use in ubuntu but nothing helps. I'm sharing my Firefox profile between Suse and ubuntu so I can't just use userChrome.css to adjust the fonts and I don't want to have to anyway.
Incidentally, why doesn't gtk-qt in Suse give options to adjust the gtk themes and fonts from KDE's control centre like in other distros?

4. When I try to use the internet update or the Yast package manager, download speeds are around 25kb/s max on a 2 meg connection. I've tried every mirror I can find but can't get any better. I'm having to use apt/synaptic which downloads at full speed. I want to learn different things so I'd rather not use apt as I've been mostly using debian based distros.

Thankyou for any help on these matters.

Nevermind. After upgrading a few packages I got a ton of error messages (far too many to even bother trying to remember). After shutting down suse wouldn't even boot up and when I did get it to I got another ton of error messages and now I have no fonts and no desktop.
I just can't be bothered sorting even more problems out. I'm gonna try one last re-install and if I still get all these problems I'm giving up on suse.
I'm not sure what the cause of all this hassle. One thing I have noticed is that certain config files I've edited manually, rather than through yast, have been overwritten on reboot. Except my display settings changed three times UNTIL I manually edited xorg.conf. Wierd.

Well after another re-install from scratch, all the problems are there again and more besides. I'm really not getting along with suse at all. It seems to be fighting me all the time no matter what I try to do.
I really don't understand what the problem is at all. Surely this can't be normal or it wouldn't be such a popular and widely used distro?
I have read that suse is one of the easier distro's to use but after nearly a week of fiddling, reading howtos and searching google and forums I'm still no closer to getting a working desktop. I have been unable to find anyone else having the same problems as me.
I have managed to get gentoo, arch, slackware, vector, ubuntu, fedora core, debian, freebsd and a few others all up and running without too many problems but suse has got me beat.
At least I now have 5 shiny new coasters.

There are some great online SuSE guides available from Fultus. Hopefully some of the issues you're encountering are addressed - Good luck with it

May i know what is your machine's specs?

@ J.W. Thanks for the link, I haven't seen those guides before I'll have a look through.

I've decided to start yet again from scratch with a completely different approach.
So far I've been installing both kde and gnome and everything else I think might be useful and then I'm being so overwhelmed by things going wrong and I'm trying to work them all out at the same time which is possibly adding to the confusion.
This time I'm going to do a minimal kde install and try to work through any problems one thing at a time.
Another main cause of these problems is yast. I just don't think I've spent enough time looking into it and don't fully understand the way it affects configuration files and because I'm used to doing it by manually editing everything I may be messing them up.
I was going to give up on suse but for some strange reason I'm more determined than ever to get evrything working.

@ TigerLinux Specs are
AMD Athlon 2.2 GHz
512MB RAM
Can't think of any detailed specs since I'm not at home but I'm not getting any hardware problems - sound, display modem are all fine.

The config files that got overwritten were probably automatically generated files that you don't edit. If you must, look for a config file of the same name with ".local" added on to the end of the name. Make your additions there and they will not be overwritten. However, I recommend that you use YaST to configure, its almost always wiser than we. Become familiar with the shell command line by examining things. Eventually you will learn that YaST does a good job for you shell command line can sometimes provide more information when debugging a problem.

Well I tried the basic kde install as I said previously and so things are much MUCH better.
Just not installing gnome seemed to have solved a lot of issues. I generally prefer gnome over kde but I think I'll stick with kde for a while.
Another problem I had was that I was unable to play any media files. I read that openSUSE doesn't include most codecs and such but I completely forgot about that. I found this page which sorted out those problems - http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/178/42/ and have now discovered amarok, which I have never used before and it's great.
I still can't get passwordless logins to work with kdm but since I only have kde at the moment then auto-login is fine.
I haven't done any messing with config files as yet and I haven't done any updates yet so I'll have to see what happens there but so far so good.

fannymites (I do hope that's just a cute name and not a physical reality - ha!)

I have one comment regarding this:

I have been there with distros before, and to be honest, I don't find it a strange reason that you refuse to give in to frustrations and obstacles. My experience is that most Linux users, as well as most of the Brits that I've ever met (granted they've all been here in the mid-West) are above average in intelligence and stubbornness.

I've tried to explain Linux use to Windows users and the best analogy they understand (in this part of the world) is deer hunting: it's not about putting meat on the table, it's about the hunt. The process of accomplishing and overcoming. It's about becoming more than a typical user who depends upon geeks to solve their problems and make them able to be productive.

To me, it's about being able to provide for my needs and have enough left over to help others.

fannymites = pet name given by an ex-girlfriend, it was meant to be affectionate (I think!)

Your comment is very true. I must admit I have vented my frustrations on forums a bit and often blamed things which are obviously working fine for other people so the problem has been my own lack of understanding/impatience/stupidity much of the time.
I've been using linux "properly" for less than a year and have tried about 12 different distros. With the exception of ubuntu, I've dumped every one once I've got it working perfectly. It's like when there's nothing going wrong I get bored.

[EDIT] Incidentally, Suse is pretty much working fine now, the only major problem I'm having
is the config files overwriting problem - this thread is an example, though it's now solved - http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...71#post1953671

I've even got embedded movies in firefox working, which I've never managed to get working properly in ubuntu. I'm not planning dumping Suse ant time soon though, it's grown on me a lot and I'm thinking of using it over ubuntu as my primary os.

i feel the same way about getting bored I loved suse when i first tried it and once it was working perfectly and i customized every drop of it I got bored and I'm attempting to move on to kubuntu. I had fedora working perfectly at one point but then i got bored and moved to debian...

Were you able to resolve large Firefox icon issue? I have the same thing. thanks

Right click on the icon bar and select customize. There's a check box for small icons.