Yesterday I tried to install openSUSE 11.1 Beta 5 from the GNOME LiveCD. It was impossible and even my Windows partition was partially damaged during this process.
The problem is, that Nautilus tries to mount every partition once it becomes available regardless of what happens otherwise. It was not only annoying to see a Nautilus window pop up constantly (the first time when configuring time and time zone... wtf?), when it popped up after I defined my partition scheme and YaST tried to resize my Windows/NTFS partition and create new ones, Nautilus mounted those and YaST aborted.

openSUSE didn't install, my NTFS partition required a chkdsk run to work again and the new partitions weren't created properly.

I don't know if it was just by chance, but after deleted nautilus from /usr/bin/ and killed the process, the partitioning went fine but YaST froze during the image writing process.

On the KDE LiveCD the Devices Plasmoid popped up constantly, but it was less obtrusive than a full-blown file manager window and it didn't try to mount the partitions. The installation went fine -- no freezing during the actual installation.