OpenSuse upgrade to leap 42.2 - missing nvidia module

Last week, my old desktop was running leap 42.1 and I decided to run a normal zypper update to get the latest packages. Even though all my repos were pointing to 42.1, it gave me "opensuse" as a package to update along with the 3.5+GB of files that needed to be downloaded for a distro update. This machine has been through every version of opensuse from 10.3 until leap 42.1 with continual distro updates. Each time there is some small problem, usually with grub pointing to invalid boot locations, audio not working or nvidia module issues. In this case, the updates ran fine, reboot to a failed graphic environment and command prompt logon. After the update all the repos were still pointing to 42.1, so I updated everything, including nvidia, to point to 42.2 locations. I ran another update, had to download a few hundred more GB of files. Reboot again and failed to load the GUI. Running startx gave the missing nvidia module error. I tried playing around with different versions of the drivers, changing from G03 to 02 and 04, but no luck there. I downloaded the driver compatible with my card (340) from nvidia's site. That said the driver was already installed and my attempt to continue installing anyways come up with some compile fails and module failed to build. So I went back to yast and messed around with the nvidia packages some more. In the install process, I noticed in the nvidia installer file name (visible in a progress bar) that after the 340.102 driver version there was a k4.4.27_2 which looks like a kernel version. Checking to see what I was currently running showed an old 4.1.15-8 version. This was the latest grub was showing despite having at least 6 newer kernels installed on the system. The latest kernel on the machine, 4.4.49-16 didn't work with nvidia either, so I worked on grub to get the 4.4.27-2 kernel loading as default and everything was working after that. So it looks like the current nvidia packages only support up to this version, so the system needs to be a bit behind what is the latest model.