And what update?
I.e. what sddm version are you using?
The config handling has been drastically changed in 0.17.0 that has been released recently.
a bit off topic but I added
Numlock=on
to /etc/sddm.conf and after an update Numlock reverted back to off
checking my /etc dir I found 2 sddm.conf files
the old I edited sddm.conf and a new one sddm.conf.rpmnew which does not have the Numlock option
now I’m even more confused does sddm read sddm.conf.rpmnew instead of sddm.conf can sddm.conf.rpmnew be deleted
No, sddm only reads /etc/sddm.conf.
You can safely delete sddm.conf.rpmnew, and it shouldn’t get created anymore in the future, as we don’t ship an sddm.conf in the package anymore.
Starting with sddm 0.17.0, the default config is shipped in /usr/lib/sddm.
And you can also create a file in /etc/sddm.conf.d/ with your modifications instead of editing the main sddm.conf (which is deprecated, but should still be respected).
That’s indeed off-topic here though… 
does the OP have 2 SuSEfirewall2 files as I seam to have both
I wrote in my previous reply that /etc/sysconfig/SuSEFirewall2 is not contained in any package, but it seems I was wrong:
rpm -qf /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2SuSEfirewall2-3.6.312.333-7.1.noarch
That’s an exception, normally the files in /etc/sysconfig/ are not part of any package and are only created (from templates in /var/adm/fillup-templates/) if they don’t exist yet.
I’m guessing software upgrades install these *.rpmnew files can they be deleted is it possible they are used instead of the already present files?
RPM does this automatically, if a package comes with a config file that already exists on the system (and has been modified).
It installs the config file as xxx.rpmnew then, to not overwrite the existing settings.
So the existance of a .rpmnew file does not indicate nor cause a problem.
They are not used at all.