Drupal scalability and port numbers

I need lto run Drupal on several webservers on the same network and use some different ports of the same host name. This morning I found the Drupal 6 installer does not have support for non-default HTTP port numbers. While trying to do an install on one machine the installer refused to function because the host name was incorrect. Even after trying to force the issue by using the $base_url variable the port numbers were removed and the installation failed.

So I created an installation on another machine using port 80 and then moved the files over to the other. I then found that language settings were being ignored when a non-default port number is used. Changing the port number using the same host name causes the language to switch.

I hope that this gets fixed in Drupal 7.