Christoph, can you test this?

There is an easy workaround: "Don't do this then", so we can decrease severity.

Sorry, I couldn't reproduce it on the Thinkpad T43 that I have there. Seife, any
clues?

no, i have had no reports of this so far. If we cannot reproduce this, it will
be hard to fix :-(

More information, I have installed the additional thinkpad package on
CD5. If I do not type "modprobe thinkpad", the configure-thinkpad will
say there is no device /dev/thinkpad or /dev/thinkpad/thinkpad, and it
will not start. If I modprobe thinkpad, then the machine simply lost
response.
Is there any non-gpl kernel that i need to install before using
configure-thinkpad? or anything related to bios setting?

ok, so the machine crashes on "modprobe thinkpad".
Try the following on a text console (init 3), login as root:

sync;chvt 10; sleep 3;sync; modprobe thinkpad
(all on one line, this will switch to console 10 where the kernel messages are
shown, wait 3 seconds and then insert the thinkpad module).
If you see crash messages after the module loaded, it would be great if you can
capture them somehow, maybe with a digital camera. If you see nothing and the
machine just does not respond anymore, it is much worse - then it is a hard hang
which is very hard to debug.

sorry, I think I didn't make myself clear enough. If I modprobe thinkpad then
type configure-thinkpad, it will start, I can see the user-interface of this
configure-thinkpad tool, and a warning saying I need to turn acpi off in order
to let this tool to control the power management (stuff like that, I can't
remember all the things). Then immediately the whole system lost response, but
the harddisk light is always on. 

But if I do turn off acpi in the grub, then after I enter configure-thinkpad,
nothing shows up, and the system lost response too.

However simply modprobe thinkpad doens't do any harm. Only when you try to use
configure-thinkpad that will cause the trouble. but if I don't modprobe
thinkpad, there is no dev/thinkpad, so configure-thinkpad will not start.

Ok, so i am lost here. I don't know about specific BIOS settings, also you do
not need to install extra kernel packages to make it work (normally, on my
machines it works).
Do you know if it worked with any previous version of SUSE Linux or with any
other Linux Distributions?

I know what is the problem now, it is the conflict of scim and gtk which also holds for acobat reader7 chinese version.
if I choose to use external GTK_IM_MODULE=xim, then it will be alright.
Hope that information helps.

so the machine does not crash if you use the different scim settings. this is strange but looks fine as a workaround.