This is just a big THANK YOU post to the opensuse developers. My vantec esata card worked great in 10.2 and I used it a ton. It would not work at all in opensuse 11.0 
and I considered leaving opensuse to find a distro that this card worked with OOTB (out of the box) as I don’t have time to fiddle with “making it work” anymore…
anyway, imagine my joy when i popped in the 11.1 RC1 live cd and my esata card worked again!!!
Nice work!
Thanks
-F