I installed SUSE 10.2 in a dual boot scenario last weekend and everything went smooth. Yesterday, the update icon in the tray showed a handful of updates so I clicked proceed (or whatever the affirmative response was) and it asked me to either run as root or to authorize myself as a valid user to do this. I added myself and retried the process successfully. Not to long after that, the update icon was an exclamation point again, so I clicked it. This time there were tons of dependency issues with the updates and I didn't install any.

So, the question - does the updater know what I have installed and only look for updates for what I have installed or does it just show me all updates available and I'll have to filter them to the best of my knowledge?

Second question, when I installed the last distro I tried, I was able to grab the first 512 bytes off of the / partition and use that to add to the windows boot menu. The last distro was a LILO based startup. I attempted to do this with the GRUB loader and that didn't work, so I ended up making a GRUB boot floppy.

Are my choices to stick with the floppy or make GRUB be the system boot loader? Or is there a way to do the windows boot loader thing like I did before?

On Q.1 - it just looks for updates for the system that you have. If you would like to install additional programmes - then use the install software option. This will then list the software available.

Sorry can't help on question 2.

Yes, the updater knows what software is installed and only offers to update installed software. Your problem is you don't have all the programs installed that you need to do the updates, either from your dvd or from SUSE repositories.

I suggest you read the sticky on this forum about adding YaST update sources so the updater can download all the files it needs. Since you didn't post which files need to be updated, I can't tell you which ones are on the dvd and which ones are available on the repositories.