We've been using Suse 9.2 and 9.3 for the last year or so, and also Mandriva - 10.2, 2005 and now 2006. I do find Suse much less usable and much flakier. We are both using Gnome, so the differences are very very clear.
The detection of usb peripherals isn't reliable. On Mandriva, you plug in and there they are on the desktop. On Suse, they may or may not be depending on how long you wait and what they are. My flash card reader mostly works, depending on what is in it. My USB pen drive never. On Mandriva, I have never had a partition fail to mount at startup. On Suse (9.2) one partition, a whole disk actually, simply vanished for no apparent reason. Upgraded to 9.3 and back it came. On Mandriva, the interface in either Gnome or KDE seems reasonably laid out. The default version of KDE on all of the Suses seems to have been designed by someone trying to make it look unusable. Then there is package installation. Urpmi really works quite well. YaST has you making pencil notes of whatever else you need to get as a dependency, then its dependencies, and I have actually found myself going around in circles - A requires B which requires A.
My impression is that Suse comes with a less complete set of the libraries you need for adding more packages.
Yes, you can install apt-rpm and edit the repositories. On Mandriva you don't really need to.
Then there are the weirdnesses. Install Sylpheed, get through the dependencies (apt-rpm is essential if you are not to be driven mad by this) and the interface is simply weird - proliferation of folders as a default for instance, terrible fonts, compared to a nice clean look on Mandriva. The file manager - I cannot for the life of me figure out why sometimes when you are looking at a folder of photos, you seem to open in EOG and at other times in some kind of viewer with editing capabilities. And why has the zooming scroll wheel suddenly stopped working?
Bottom line: your failing installation is a Message from Above. Someone is saying to you, You Do Not Want This Installation.
Get Mandriva 2006 instead! It should have been right there on the stand. If they are out now, I'll copy one for you if you like. If you download the free CDs, you need to use the Mandriva admin centre and then add the official and contribution repositories, but it will lead you through that. You can also install over the net using one of the boot disks. I've done both, on different machines, and found either completely painless.
Good luck
Peter