@Txnnok -
Woohoo to you, too! 
You are to be congratulated and commended for your patience, perseverance, and creativity in working the problem through. When I saw you had an xfc board with a Blackie I thought you might be a 'clocker or at the least unafraid of the bios and the kernel - that proved to be the case. You are going to do well.
Looking back, I should have suggested the pci=nomsi argument earlier. That is a widely used fix for via chipsets, this is the first time I’ve seen it needed for an nvidia MCP55 Southbridge, although I think the culprit really is the bios. So I’ve learned something, too - get into dmesg earlier, be more aggressive with the kernel (you would find this is the approach over in Gentoo land and even in the Fedora community more so than here, as those distros are really targeted at hardware/OS geeks and IT folks while openSUSE fits the intermediate/advanced end-user better).
As far as learning, that is a very individual thing. People process data and convert it to information differently. At HP our approach to training customers was to provide a conceptual foundation followed by real-world hands-on problem solving; learning by doing. With *nix or for that matter any serious OS, you can spend ages peeling the onion; we found it better to select a project that offers a meaningful reward and is likely achievable in a reasonable time frame, and then use that as a framework. MythTV is actually a good, intermediate-to-advanced level, example. Or e.g., a distributed LAN can provide a good start with the bash shell, writing a robust backup application using nfs, rsync, and conditional processing. What is key is to choose projects that feed your intellectual curiosity.
@oldcpu offers a good insight comparing MythTV on Ubuntu vs openSUSE. The Ubuntu folks have done a great job with “just works”, making complex tasks achievable for non-technical users. And they’ve done it the Debian way - from the command line. Or there’s a simple encapsulated gui or script that just does everything for you. The downside is that those users have little to no idea what they are actually doing or why. Personally I like SuSE’s approach because one gets a more secure handle on what it being done, which equips better for later maintenance/support and is foundational for other projects. Even when using the gui, you’ll notice that while SuSE uses it to guide the user while not dumbing down the user; the original terms are left intact. The YaST modules are a superb example of that; take a look at the sysconfig editor and then the actual files being updated for the kind of value-add in a distro like this. Ubuntu is great for the end-user who just wants to use apps, SuSE is better for learning the OS and how to do things for yourself.
One other thought: It’s a good idea to choose a particular distro platform early. Moving back and forth between Fedora and SuSE is relatively easy; they’re close cousins. But the value-add and administrative layers are entirely different compared to a Debian distro (the *buntu’s are all Debian), even more so Slackware, and drastically so with Gentoo (a source-based distro; lean, fast, and seriously technical). Point is, you can waste a lot of time re-learning just a different way of doing the same thing from one distro to another, without a lot of value out of it.
Along with the Concepts article linked above, also take a look here for a simple starting overview Linux For Newbies - Wikibooks. The administrative guides for openSUSE (at the Novell site) and Fedora/Red Hat are very good, and both also offer serious tutorials because of their being commercial enterprise vendors. For general and in-depth studies, O’Reilly has the most comprehensive library I know of (with the exception of course of what’s provided by the bigs dogs, HP/IBM/Sun).
Welcome to the community!!!