Yet ANOTHER SuSE Kernel SECURITY update

It is a side effect of the 'release early, release often' philosophy in the open source world. The alternative is to accumulate fixes into a 'service pack' type bundle, leaving a longer period of vulnerability in the mean time.

It really depends on the nature of the security issues being patched. If you have most services turned off or firewalled, you can safely ignore many issues. Similarly, many security flaws require a local account on the system (i.e. privilege escalation attacks). If you have no other users on the system, you can usually defer these patches as well. As long as you review the security advisories as they are announced and understand the impact, it is possible to have long periods with no updates required. I've personally had a system running as long as 2 years before it required updating. Most security fixes actually address something running in user space (httpd, sendmail, perl, etc) and can be updated without rebooting the system. I've found that critical kernel updates are actually rather rare.

I've taken the liberty of removing the XP newsgroup from my reply, I apologize if I've derailed a cross-post-troll-in-progress. :P

Thad