A few questions about skinning with symmetry and SMD export

http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/5739/blenderss.jpg
Hi i recently successfully wrote a little tool to extract the 3d models from the PC game Street Fighter IV (including skeletons and bone weighs )and save them as SMD files, but because I’m a novice at Blender I have a few questions:

  1. Why do the bones appear so small? How do I make it so the ends touch end to end?
  2. How do I weight paint a limb bone so that the same thing is painted on the opposite limb? As you can see right and left is denoted by a capital R and L in front of the bone name. If i want to write a code to inject SMD files back into a readable format for the game, I need the bone names to remain the same.
  3. Are there any working SMD exporter for Blender 2.4? I downloaded one but i keep getting an “index out of range” error. I currently have to switch to Blender 2.5 in order to export to SMD.