SuSE 7.1 - firewall

Hi there A customer had bought the new SuSE Linux. I saw there were lots of changes... e.g. the fiewall script "SuSEfirewall". It runs three times. On the installation we have the following problem: the first time the firewall script runs the Network is not up so we only get an error message. Can someone tell me if this is normal or how I can fix this. Since I didn't get the subscription-update until now - I don't have anything here to make experiments or to read... Thanx for any hint. Christian