Comment # 38 on bug 1046277 from Dr. Werner Fink

(In reply to Atri Bhattacharya from comment #37)
> Just upgraded to TW version 20170721, but this problem persists (despite my
> understanding that the fixes from comment #36 are included).
> 
> Same error message upon running pdflatex:
> 
> This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.18 (TeX Live 2017/TeX Live for
> SUSE Linux) (preloaded format=latex)
>  restricted \write18 enabled.
> ---! /var/lib/texmf/web2c/pdftex/latex.fmt made by different executable
> version
> (Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)

Could it be that you have disabled execution of the rpm scriptlets ... or do
you have a wrong system date?

I'm not able to reproduce this ... please search in the zypper log files below
/var/log/zypp/ and in /var/log/zypper.log for a reason of this.