It took me a couple of tries, but I finally got SaX (SuSE’s X configuration tool) to configure the system for my Microsoft Intellimouse TrackBall.  Except then I couldn’t use SaX, because it didn’t recognize my mouse.  X likes it fine, but whatever SaX is using to talk to the mouse doesn’t know that the mouse type has changed.  And when you lose the mouse in SaX, you can’t operate the program.  It’s a bad idea, by the way, to run SaX if X is running.  It’s supposed to work, but every time I’d exit SaX back to X, something would be goofed up.  (Also by the way:  if you lose the mouse, you can bring up the KDE menu by hitting Alt+F1.  Trial and error…)

It turns out that I needed to change the mouse type in rc.config.  I wonder if that would have automatically updated the XF86Config configuration file when I ran SuSEconfig.  I guess I could experiment to find out, but after spending an hour on this little exercise I have no real desire to screw it up just to see if the configuration software works correctly.  It seems to me that there should be one place to set the mouse type.