I decided to do the update in Smart instead:

• Install Pascal's package for 10.0.
• Various iterations of adding appropriate channels (openSUSE OSS, non-OSS, updates, Pascal's repo)
• smart update
• smart upgrade
• Above step fails: error: filesystem-10.2-22 requires rpmlib(BuiltinLuaScripts) <= 4.2.2-1 so do it in stages...
• smart upgrade rpm rpm-python pam pam-modules
• At this point I cheated and did rpm -Uvh /var/lib/smart/packages/*.rpm
• SuSEconfig ; ldconfig (just to be on the safe side)
• cat /etc/SuSE-release
  openSUSE 10.2 (i586)
  VERSION = 10.2
• Reboot!
• At this point I had to use the hypervm frontend to login and restart the SSH daemon and insserv it. Another reboot to confirm that it had "taken" and voila! I have updated it to openSUSE 10.2