absolutely no idea (usually I am on OSX (meaning essentially (a derivative of free)BSD when using the CLI) and never using windows :). and when now booting into the windows partition still in existence on this thinkpad I did not change any settings there. only checking the bluetooth availability there as well as in the BIOS.
so to the best of my knowledge I did not alter any setting. but of course the initiated windows upgrade might have done “something” which restored sane behaviour of bluetooth in opensuse. too bad that I do not understand what that “something” might have been, though 
but I am happy that bluetooth has now become functional. thanks a lot for bothering to respond and for providing pointers to some useful commands I did not yet know of.