Well with the assistance of the guys over at OpenSuSE forums as well as some of the things you pointed out, I was able to determine that my version of KDE was 4.4.1 and my machine did not like this. I did not attempt to upgrade, but had several unnecessary repositories loaded and did not check carefully enough before allowing upgrades. I reverted back to KDE 4.3.5 and all is fine, lovin' it.

Thanks for your time, and I do apologize for not understanding some of what you were telling me. Hopefully the next time I log in here I will be much more savvy.

Cheers

Rod