The reason why I would like to get SuSEfirewall to work is to setup a firewall without having to learn all about iptables - I'm a programmer not a sysadm and just need a setup to protect our office computers.

You could try shorewall (www.shorewall.net) as well. This firewall is IMHO much more flexible than SuSEfirewall2 and has a lot of good documentation, but you have to spend a little more time for configuring it. I have it working perfectly here on SuSE 8.0. Andreas