There doesn’t seem to be (yet) a definitive work yet on how to recover from this. Reinstalls didn’t help me, and I couldn’t boot failsafe mode. I wound up booting from an 11.0 “Live” DVD, opening YaST/Partitioner to mount my root drive as “/dummy” - then opening File Manager Super User Mode and following the directions to remove the jexec files from /dummy/etc described the end of this thread:
Boot hangs at “Starting Service Jexec” - openSUSE Forums
It seems to be an 64-bit 11.1 issue, but I may have also observed it in 11.0 x64. This thread may also be useful, but seems to be useful for people who can at least boot to failsafe mode:
11.1 Hangs on first boot - openSUSE Forums
Now how do I get java back without the problem recurring?