I have noticed today when I was working on the normalized keyboard (cn)
for the console that the dead key bug has not been fixed yet with this
new SuSE version.

The dead key support has been broken in SuSE Linux for quite a while.
The last time I played with the definition keys was in 2001 when
I was using an Aptiva keyboard which is a ca keyboard and found no
support whatsoever in SuSE. At the time the dead keys were working
very well on the console.
The only French Canadian keyboard supported on the console by SuSE
is cf. I don't see any support for cn or ca. cn is a keyboard pushed
by the Québec and Canadian governements as it is more multilingual
than the so called multilingual keyboard ca.

I think that the last time the dead keys worked was with versions 8.x
It is possible that that support was broken when you introduced support
for UTF or should I say when you switched from ISO to UTF8 on the console.

I saw the same problem with Ubuntu and Fedora but not with Slackware and
I am told that it works in Mandriva.

This is not the only thing that don't work right on the console. When I 
do a loadkeys to test my new keymap a lot of stuff is messed up. I can 
no longer see letters like é or à as I get a blank. Outside an editor 
this messes up the command line, the parser seems lost as to where the
cursor is supposed to be. A reboot appeared as the only solution I've 
found to correct the problem.

Even if I don't do a loadkeys I do see problems with the console support.
If I go in jstar to read a text. When I do a search and want to remove
the CR which looks like a highlighted M in that editor. Normally ctrl P
and ctrl M works but not in SuSE 10.0, at least most of the time. I 
did have it work once yesterday after I had booted to SuSE 9.3 and back.
I can't see why that would make a difference, probably a coincidence.
This one does work in SuSE 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3

I noticed that the ctrlr doesn't work on the console while it
does work in gnome with xkb. With the cn keyboard I need both
the alt and ctrl keys from the right of the keyboard to generate
extra characters.

Actually in xkb I can even use the left windows key as a control gr
and it works nicely but on the console no matter what I do something
overrides my choice on the windows keys. I have stickers on those
windows keys and in gnome I use them for keys that I use a lot and
one of those key I use to replace the one key that is missing on
the US Keyboard (Ù, ù) When I press on the left windows key it
switches console even if the cn.map file has that key reassigned
to something else.

The dead keys do work with gnome but not on the console. This is
extremely annoying because I like to work on the console with
turbo vision and jstar and it is not possible to write in French on
the console, too many missing characters.

I wasn't aware until today that Mandriva does work with this. I may
choose to switch if it turns out to be correct and SuSE doesn't fix
this very nasty bug.
When I search on the net to get a solution, all I find is people
complaining that it doesn't work with SuSE or Ubuntu.