Home page problems with closed sites

I'm posting this to bluemarine, but it's a more general issue.

I have several sites that are closed to the public and require an approved account prior to accessing content. This has been a very common request over the past few months.

In the simplest setup, access_control is set to allow viewing/editing permissions only for authenticated users.

The main problems are:
1) Inability to create a welcome page for non-authenticated users
2) The 'edit primary links' menu shows up on the front page.
(The user will typically not want to disable the primary links menu for authenticated users)
3) User gets 'access denied' message
4) Error log fills up with access denied messages every time a user visits the site prior to logging in.

An image of what the home page will look like is attached.

I have skirted the first problem by using taxonomy access control to create more complex permissions.
The problem with this method is that all future content has to be created with correct permissions and users may inadvertently make content available to the entire world. Also, the primarly links meny (i.e. create content menu) shows up for non-authenticated users.
I've also tried securesite, and other solutions as well.

I think that there should be a much simpler solution, which should include:
- Option to not show the 'primary links' menu for non-authenticated users
- Ability to define a simple welcome page(s) for non-authenticated users. This might be implemented in a similar to the default drupal page for a new site, which request the user to create an admin account.

The following is another topic, but I also think that a coherent ssl / https login/password/sensitive infrastructure is extremely important for these types of installations. I've seen several attempts over the last couple of years, but nothing seems to be standardized or built into the drupal core.