Apparently that was the first OpenSuSE 10.1 in my previous post. I reinstalled the machine with the "remastered" ISO and it was much happier to allow me to update.
I wonder why Novell called it "remastered" instead of 10.1.1 or something. The release so nice they named it twice? Historical revisionism? Curious what software vendors do.
Oh well, I'm sure there's equally stupid error messages in even the remastered release.