NB: I'm a clueless newbie.
OK, if you press ctrl-alt-F10, you'll see a text screen with some messages on it.
So I can. Wow!
(You can press alt-F7 to get back you your desktop.) Can you switch to that screen, plug in the flash drive, and tell us what the messages are?
All very reassuring: it decided that SCSI device sda1 was there. Sho' 'nuff, Alt-F7 got me to the desktop and I could then mount, use, and unmount the device. It's working. (I'll give thanks or pay penance by providing freedb.org with the details of at least one more Latvian CD.) I don't know what went wrong yesterday: I don't think that an icon appeared for sda1. On the other hand, yesterday was so full of SuSEgnUlinuxKDE frustrations that I was becoming slightly deranged. Is there a name for the condition the system's in after I've pressed Ctrl-Alt-F10? (Is it perhaps in something-or-other "mode"?) If I know what it's called, I can attempt to read a bit about it.