When I think back to that rendering "take photo" problem, I think I remember now it wasn't the java version, it might have been because of the graphics card driver. My memory is getting pretty foggy on that. Novell uses a graphics card driver called, Nouveau and while it does do well with most graphics cards (and my NVidia card too), it didn't do as well as I had hoped for 3D performance. To solve that, I had to install the proprietary NVidia one.
I'm very glad that IcedTea is working for you.
So, for my original java 64 bit vs. 32 bit problem, I tried out the SeaMonkey browser from SuSE's repo and it was configured for 64 bit to start with, so when I tried it, it picked up the 64 bit java and uses it nicely and all my add-ons that I had installed previously are being used too. So now, everything is doing ok, including the "Furiture Library Editor 1.4" as well as SH3D. ^_^
Another Linux trick you might not have known: Have you tried doing this at the commandline:
uname -a
That should tell you the kernel you are using and the version of Linux you have.