Thanks, Felix, for your quick reply. I should have caught the problem myself, but was careless, and once I started having trouble I developed tunnel vision looking past simpler solutions for something obscure. I did think it rather strange that no one else had reported that problem. As a followup, I did an update on the the Dell which went very smoothly. I also ran an update from 15.2 on an old, ~8 year old, HP Pavilion running 15.2. The initial update hung near the end--caps lock LED blinking, mouse, touch pad, and keyboard dead. I did a hard reboot and while it wouldn't boot from the first kernel on the boot menu, I got a message that the kernel wasn't installed, it did boot from the second kernel on the boot menu. In the end I redid the update from the beginning and it seems to be working fine now. Thanks again for pointing out what the problem was, though I'm a bit embarrassed I didn't catch it myself. George -- George H. Griffin Powered by opensuse Leap 15.2 "... now you're really in the total animal soup of time—" Allen Ginsberg