Hey Nicolas,
I just tried your patch on my project, and it went down from over 7100 bytes (just barely fitting inside the Atmega8) to 5854 bytes! Wow! I'm at work so I will not be able to download the code and make sure it still works until I get home.
This is on Windows XP with Arduino-0006.
I will post again when I get home and verify whether the code still works or not. Assuming it does, I think this patch should be worked into the next release of Arduino.
Thanks!
- Don