Found the solution.
Opensuse 12.3 Gnome 3.6 installs themes in .local/share/themes and can be read by the Gnome Tweak tool and applied. But in Opensuse 12.3 Gnome 3.8, installing the theme via Gnome Tweak tool puts them in that directory but they cannot be applied. The working path is .themes in the home directory. Copy the theme there and applying was the trick.
Thank you
0rAX0, feels good to be back home