Translation functionality in Drupal 6

Yesterday I tried to create a drupal 6 site with translation, and I felt horribly compared to drupal5+i18n.
I did not test it further, so I will ask about it before submitting bugs. Maybe I am making something wrong..

Problems:
1. custom menu translation
2. front page does not respect actual language
3. URL aliases (path module)
4. language link in nodes

details
1. custom menu translation (using show menu (block) by actual language approach)
in drupal 5 I created different menus for different languages, and set block visibility like: show block only on hu/* or en/* pages (and some similar settings)
that does not work in 6, so I used php for visibility setting like this

<?php
global $language;
return ($language->language == 'hu')
?>

it looks like it works for now. (but had some problems with it, when the menu does not change, but can not tell what was wrong exactly. will try to test it more)

I know I am not the only one with the problem of custom menu translation http://drupal.org/node/206337
a) So is there any other way to translate custom menus, until i18n module is not released for drupal 6?
b) Would it be much to ask to add new setting: block visibility by language? The described php is not hard for me, but it might be for other users.

2. front page does not respect actual language
if I promote node to front page it will show up regardless the node language is different than actual language. I still don't know how should I fix this, but it worked nicely in d5+i18n.

3. URL aliases (path module)
I had problems when changed default language to Hungarian. The path aliases did not show up in the address bar or the English menu links showed "page not found". I did not investigate it further, maybe just a caching problem. But I can still reproduce this without a problem. (Language negotiation is set to "Path prefix only.")

a) Is there a way to always show the language in URL even for default language? I am concerned about when I change the default language the links will change.
b) Can I use the same path alias name for different languages? It showed me a database error, when I tried it. It definitely seems like a bug.
user warning: Duplicate entry 'front-hu' for key 2 query: UPDATE url_alias SET src = 'node/5', dst = 'front', language = 'hu' WHERE pid = 1 in ../modules/path/path.module on line 98.

4. language link in nodes
I don't want to see the language change link inside node. The Language switcher block is absolutely enough. I removed the $links from node.tpl.php, but there should be a better way.

a) Is there any better way?

I did not remember more problems, it was quite late when the site get to the *translation working* state. But these problems definitely does not exists in d5+i18n..