I had been having a really strange problem when moving a hdd with suse 10 from one server to another.  We typically have a server where we do a basic installation of suse then we install the hdd in another server. Then we just configure the nics and we are done. With suse 10 we had been having problems with the network cards on the 'end' server starting with 1 or even 2 depending on how many were found on the previous server.  This was causing having with programs that were looking for eth0 or eth1. None the less after a huge amount of digging on google we found a reference to the 
/etc/sysconfig/network/config  file.

This is what caused the 'nics' history option inside yasts / suse 10

 
vim /etc/sysconfig/network/config

 
go to the bottom and find this line

FORCE_PERSISTENT_NAMES=yes

 
change it to

FORCE_PERSISTENT_NAMES=no

From a discussion with the graveyard NOC dude at servepath windows has a similar issue ... but with windows you have to reinstall the dead card then remove it from the device list ----- where as on linux you just change that flag in the config file.

# Forces all interfaces eth* ath* wlan* and ra* to be persistent via udev.
# See /usr/share/doc/package/sysconfig/README.Persistent_Interface_Names for
# details.
#

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