you say you don't have a config script for eth1. why not? is it supposed to be configured or not? if it is, then what IP is it supposed to have. static allocations or dhcp?
those are questions for you to think about, btw, not necessarily to answer here.
try creating a config for eth1, even if it's just a minimal one with ONBOOT="no", suse might be doing some insane default automagic crap if there's no config file.