I think I'll bring this one back to life and share my learned lesson with the world.
The moral comes at the beginning of the story:
DON'T JACK AROUND WITH THE SUSE FACTORY REPO ON YOUR DAILY USE MACHINE!
A LOT of my apps, including some parts of Firefox and quite a few Kxxx apps were displaying the exact same behavior.
To fix: I had to ditch smart (obviously) and go back to yucky-yast (I call it that because it just takes too darn long to resolve dependencies, even if it is far and away improved over 10.1). I removed all sources except the DVD and suse update. In yast's package manager I viewed by package groups, selected "zzzAll" and sorted the list by the installed version. There was, of course, no blue. Black I left alone. Red: I reinstalled the available version, essentially downgrading a plethora of my packages to make certain that ANYTHING from the factory got the axe. This method also ensured that manually installed packages or ones exclusive to other repos were not tampered with (such as 4L/LightScribe).
Quick reboot...
I have text in my gui apps again! Open smart. Zap the factory channel/repo and its mirrors. Install all of my updates AGAIN from the other repos.
Total time for this "simple" affair? About 15 hours, including downloading some packages 2 and 3 times.
ksmarttray isn't detecting updates nearly as often anymore, either
J