The Dreaded SuSE Connection Failure

I went down to my computer this evening to discover that clicking the mouse no longer did anything, rebooted...and found myself saddled with an infuriating bug a few SuSE (and possibly other distro) users have been encountering.  In it, the wireless adapter can see other routers, but attempting to actually connect to them basically stalls out and fails. Same happened no matter whether I told it to use Network Manager or the traditional ifup approach.

I remembered that much of the problem is that SuSE forgets that it's supposed to access the network through a router. I looked up the "route" commands in the must-own Linux Phrasebook, and managed to at least connect to the router this way:
ifdown eth1 && ifup eth1
route add -net default gw my-router's-IP-here dev eth1

That let me access things that use an IP, like most Internet radio stations, but it didn't let me access anything that required a site name.  Well, at least now I didn't have to drain the batteries on my iRiver H10 to have something to listen to...

I returned to the proverbial drawing board and opened the YaST Network Settings, which I experimented with for a painfully long time.  Arrgh. Eventually, I discovered that I could get online with these settings -- each boldfaced & underlined area is a tab in Network Settings, italics is the name of something to change:
Global Options: Network Setup Method is Traditional
Overview: click on Edit for your adapter, go to the Address tab:
Choose "Statically assigned IP Address"
IP Address: 192.168.1.9, Subnet Mask: /24, Hostname: your pick
Click Next to get to Wireless Device Settings, click "Expert". Set Access Point to your router's name, Power Management: off, AP ScanMode 2. Click "OK", then "Next".
Hostname/DNS: Hostname & Domain: your pick, Name Server 1: your router's IP**
Routing: Default IPv4 Gateway: your router's IP, Device: -, Enable IP Forwarding ON

**If you don't know your router's IP, it almost certainly begins with 192.168.1 and after another period, has either a 0 or a 1.  If one doesn't work, try the other!

I'm sure that some (possibly most) of the settings I've specified have nothing to do with fixing the problem, but those are the certainly-not-default ones I altered.  Hopefully this will help somebody else frantically searching the web for help through another computer/distro, since I didn't find a whole lot that was useful last I looked.

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