I did a new installation from the Open Suse 11.2 live CD, this time without activating “KDE wallet”. I don’t know if this was the culprit but updates are now running smoothly without any error msgs.
Well, indirectly perhapes. When I used kwallet it interrupted the update applet asking for a password. I don’t know if my connection was peculiar about that, but updates have run flawless since I choosed to not using kwallet. Just a thought …