There is an incompatibility between dhcpcd and the dhcp servers in my Linksys BEFW11S4 original and v4 routers. Converting SuSEs 10.0 and 10.2 from dhcpcd to dhclient solves the problem.

SuSE dhcpd Notes:

• SuSE supplies two clients: dhcpcd and dhclient. man 8 ifup is used to start the configuration and will call either client (via the devices config file).
• There is startup info in /etc/sysconfig/network and also /etc/dhclient.conf. YaST control center doesn’t provide much access to these programs. For example I can’t figure out how to switch from dhcpcd to dhclient, or how to pass different startup parameters to dhcpd.
• Learned from the web that the clients are somewhat interchangeable and that the DHCLIENT_BIN option in /etc/sysconfig/network/dhcp controls this. Can edit this file directly or from YaST /etc/sysconfig editor.
• dhclient would set the host and domainname so I had to turn off those switches as well.