Hi, just thought my experience might be of some help. I was using OpenSuse 11 on a HP-Pavilion dv6000 laptop until a couple of days ago, and everything (including wireless) worked flawlessly out of the box. After a clean install of 11.3 I had no wireless and no wired connection with K-Networkmanager. Fortunately wired connection worked with If-up, so I updated KDE to version 4.5.1 and installed Network manager plasmoid. Now everything works just as it should! Note: I did not really troubleshoot the issue (and I am really not an experienced user), so I am not sure that this is a solution.
Hope this is of some help. Thanks to all Suse developers for this wonderful distro and to all the users whose posts helped me in the past.
I use a close cousin to your box, I would think it’s more likely that when you connected online the first time through your wired connection your kupdate updated your network drivers which was your real fix…
Of course just a guess…
Tony