10.1 Alpha 3 - Three Questions

My second install of 10.1 alpha on an Apple G 5 went smoothly, I have a fully working system with X. I have three problems and one query:

1. For a while, I had trouble setting up the network. I have a small switch which acts as a dhcp server. When I ran ifup eth0, I saw that my computer was assigned the correct IP, but when I tried to ping something, I got a "network unreachable" error. Looking at the system logs, I found out that an application NetworkManager assigned a random (?) IP address to my card, overriding the value that ifup set correctly. When I ran "killall NetworkManager," my network was functional. So my question: what is NetworkManager? Can it be uninstalled or can it be set up to help me instead of doing random things?

2. I like the look of Gnome much better than kde, so I opted for the Gnome desktop. But what I get is a heavily kde-fied Gnome: many kde apps, icons are kde, menu bar at bottom instead of top of window... Can this be modified so I have a cleaner Gnome look? Also, I couldn't find a menu editor for Gnome. Has this been disabled for Suse?

3. THis one is unresolved: when I try to update via YaST, every repository gives a cryptic error. Most say "404," so I assume the URL must be wrong, some say "550." Has anyone been successful in updating OpenSuse via YaST?