opensuse updater reported it was performing an update to the update software itself. Following this update opensuse updater has a yellow warning triangle and clicking on it gets this text:

Can't launch zypp-checkpatches-wrapper helper program. Make sure zypper package is installed and working

Even worse if I go into yast and software management I get this error:

Error loading language plugin /usr/lib/YaST2/plugin/libpy2lang_perl.so: libzypp.so.324: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
No such client module sw_single

Run yast2-h for help on usage