Rebooting problems are frustrating, finding the cause is sometimes difficult.
Your system specs. are the minimal that Suse would need.
1. the first issue is the medium that you are using to boot. I assume the suse cd disks are commercial? If not, if you burned your own boot disk, say to do a net install, what speed did you burn the disk at?
If a commercial set, try booting from cd #2 and see if the install starts ok.
Use the keyboard to pick the installation button/menu, not the mouse.
2. Hardware. Well, it seems that the memory is OK, but you may have a funky cdrom drive. If you burned your own disks, what medium are you using, cdrw or cdr media? You also tried removing some hardware from the system. That is a good start. What power rating is your power supply?
Have you tried any other OS on the system, such as Windows?