How can I stop annoying kde intrusions? Every time I dial my ISP I get
a kwallet popup without any button to tell the obnoxious thing to go away
and never come back.

I would like to use the sw that came with Suse 10 but distasteful
persistent intrusions like this make me wonder if another window
manager might be better.

I do wide variety of a lot of things such as DVD burning, sound editing, etc.
that make a window manager nicer than a command line only. I came from
an environment where clicking on help at the top of the screen usually gave
you help with what you were doing rather than help regarding the windows
manager only.

You can adjust the behavior of kwallet in KDE control center -> Security & Privacy -> KWallet.

On SuSE 9.3, the F1 key is an application shortcut for help. I just tried it out, and it is working for me. Try searching for "application shortcut" in the KDE control center. There are different Schemes you can try. The one in particular you are interested in is Keyboard Shortcuts -> Shortcut Schemes (tab) -> Application Shortcuts. Enter help in the Search field. At the bottom, you select the default button. The default the F1 key. You could also choose to use the Windows or Apple scheme if that is what you are used to.