openSUSE 13.2 Factory: NM and installation problems in July 21 iso

Hello,

I just did a zypper up from kernel 3.15.0-rc7-1-desktop to 3.16.0-rc5-1-desktop. Near the end of the upgrade process (1590 packages in all!) suddenly the Internet connection was lost and the taskbar shows "NetworkManager is not running" and there's a red X over NM icon. I could not reconfigure the connection via YAST. Software Management shows that NM version 0.9.8.10-1.2 is installed. Interestingly, libNetworkManagerQt0 shows version number0.9 .8.1-1.2 in red color.
I then run dmesg | less through the terminal and it shows on Lines 655-673:

All other distros and Windows are fine with the Net.

After using another method to download and burn the July 21 Factory KDE64 iso to a DVD (MD5 is OK), I ran the disk in Live mode, with nomodeset boot option because the video card needs nvidia driver. The screen shows the same message given previously when running dmesg|less. Again I saw the red X over NM icon indicating that Network Manager is not running.

Also tried to install the July 21 Factory iso on the existing openSUSE 13.2 Milestone 0 root partition but after expert partitioning I had to abort the installation because of the following error message:

The Installer tries to put Grub(2) on the root partition of another distro. Before today I have always been able to boot into 13.2 Factory (ext4 file system), via chainloading, from the Grub menu generated by the default OS called openSUSE 12.2 (Grub 1) in a multi-boot system, with no problems whatsoever.

Any suggestions? Thank you!

:(