Where are /etc/skel files?

When I attempt to create a new user in my SuSE 7.1/KDE 2.2.2 partition, using addusr, yast, yast2 or kuser, I fail. I have found that, even though rpm -q says that aaa_skel.rpm is installed, and indeed there is a /ect/skel directory it is empty. I did rpm -i --force --nodeps aaa_skel.rpm with no complaints from the system but no files either. Where are they and what's going on here. I can't recreate the user that was created when I installed my system, and really don't want to have to reinstall SuSE to be able to create users. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.