I have concerns about how I am going to manage the 11.2 partitions once the testing is done. I had thought it would be a matter of editing the boot loader in Yast, and deleting or formatting the partitions. Unfortunately, with the failure of 11.2 to detect other Linux installations (even opneSUSE!), I ended up with two boot loaders. Does anyone else have a scheme for this? What would I expect if I went ahead and deleted the partitions?
That’s why i always recommend to have one /boot partition for ALL distributions 
Then it is easy to adjust menu.lst to have all the distribution in one menu WITHOUT the need to chainload
Good point, but do you have any recommendations on handling the 11.2 boot loader? Do you think it would be safe to simply delete the partition?
To be hones i would clear the boot loader from the MBR (not the MBR itself with partitions).
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=446 count=1 should do it.
Then i would always install grub to mbr and have ONLY one /boot partition where i would have initrd and vmlinuz files from any other distro (i don’t know about Ubuntu as it has grub 2 now, it might be a little complicated with it), so if you install any other distro just have the menu.lst backed up earlier and the /boot for other partition set for your main /boot (DO NOT FORMAT IT!!). When You install the other distro tell it NOT TO install the boot loader. You will do it later from the YaST boot loader module. You only need to point it to correct initrd and vmlinuz file and correct root partition and that is it