FreeBSD on AMD64 3000+ - amd64 or i386 version of FreeBSD?

[Mark Kane]

Hi everyone. I have decided to ditch Windows XP completely when my 
motherboard comes back from it's RMA. I have a few questions about the 
different FreeBSD versions.

1) I have an AMD64 3000+ processor. I've been reading some things around 
the Internet about ports and other software not compiling properly with 
the amd64 version of FreeBSD. Most of the things I've read about this 
have been from 2004 or even late 2003, so I'm wondering how things have 
progressed since then. Are there still many ports or software that don't 
compile properly? Is there a list somewhere of known ports not to work 
on the amd64 version?

Here is a short list of main things I will use this PC for:
IRC (X-Chat, maybe irssi)
Web Browsing (Mozilla Firefox)
Media playing (XMMS/VLC/mplayer)
Email (Mozilla Thunderbird)
Audio Streaming/Recording (streamTranscoder, streamripper, sc_trans maybe)
BitTorrent (Azureus)
Audio/Video Encoding (lame, oggenc, various video encoding tools)

Basically I'm wondering opinions on either the i386 or amd64 version of 
FreeBSD for my hardware for FreeBSD 5.4. Which works better? For what 
reasons? Are there any other caveats?

2) Will my hardware work properly with the amd64 version? I see my 
motherboard (Giga-Byte GA-K8NS Pro) is listed as "Functional" on the 
FreeBSD amd64 motherboard page 
(http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64/motherboards.html).

My other hardware includes:

Sound Blaster Augidy 2 Platinum
GeForce FX5600 (MSI)
TDK VeloCD 40x12x48 CD Burner
Sony DRU500A DVD Burner

3) I know of a couple applications that don't build on the amd64 such as 
linux-firefox and Azureus. Does anyone have any info on when there might 
be versions compatible with the amd64, or if there is any other software 
like them that would work with the amd64 version (main concern is flash 
on websites)?

Thanks very much in advance for your opinions!

-Mark