I noticed that ZMD runs for quite a while when your machine boots. ZMD is used to manage software through YaST. SUSE has its own software that works fine and does not appear to be such a machine hog as ZMD.

To shut of ZMD open a Konsole (ALT + F2 then type konsole) and enter the following.

chkconfig -s novell-zmd off

After running the command I no longer experienced the resource hogging that ZMD appears to have caused.

If the SUSE Updater does not start after you reboot then start it manual from the menus.

System->Desktop Applet->openSUSE Update Applet

If you haven’t installed SUSE yet I recommend this instead.