Yast in Suse 13.1

When installing an application, YAST does not seem to be completing the configuration. Everything appears to proceed normally, but menus, libraries, fonts etc. ( Tasks that were done by SUSEconfig pre 12.3) are not happening and even when launched from a command line fail. All applications I've tried fail the same way. This pretty much renders the whole system useless.

There must be something fundamentally wrong with the install (er). Can you advise any next steps?

Clean install, Suse 13.1 x86_64 from day one DVD. Plain vanilla AMD single core /w 2GB (my test bed machine)

Thanks
Dave