OpenSUSE Multimedia :: Flash Is Jerking Replay Is Garbage?

i installed 11.3 with kde on my wife's computer a couple of months ago, and i am slowly trying to fix the holes in the installation. things that she "can't live without". now i am working on flash. videos and other flash videos in the browser are all jerky, with very poor playback quality as a result. the playback skips forward a couple seconds, then pauses. this appears to be exactly like a bandwidth issue - but it is not. bandwidth is fine, and allowing the vid to download completely before playing makes no difference. i uninstalled all flash stuff, then reinstalled from a standard repo selection that included packman. pretty much oldcpu's recommended list of repos. no change. i've spent hours searching and reading threads, trying to find a gold nugget. one said delete ~/.macromedia and ~/.adobe. did that. no change.

update everything. no change. reboot. no change. somebody mentioned he was having a firefox specific issue with similar symptoms. i try chrome. no change. some ppl seem to connect flash misbehavior with vid driver issues. this box has an ati onboard gpu - ati radeon xpress 200. so i spend some time looking through some threads i turned up regarding updating that - but this leads me to more searching and no answers. i don't know how to tell what driver i have installed for ati, i don't know how to find the kernel config file to see if ati has been built in, and more.