Well, moving to openSUSE 12.2 may not be the solution. Since you found out a new user doesn’t experience the problem, the origin of the problem is in your homedir. If you keep that, you probably will keep the issue as well. Don’t know if this has been asked yet, but did you by any chance try to “solve” things by running desktop programs as root?
I’ll be doing a clean install rather than trying to upgrade.
I thought running programs as root was a bad thing - but I tried it with Firefox, it does run.