Palemoon: Damned if I do and even more dammned if I don't

[Chipster.org]

I'm wrestling with starting Palemoon with Unicontroller.

If I start a fresh install and use a US_PAC file, I get the sites I want proxied flawlessly.  However I have three consistent problems:

First: while the home (startup) page is set to "http://samplesite.org", the browser tries and fails to open "http://samplesite.org:8080".  Palemoon does not seem to remember me previously changing the Preferences to use "http://samplesite.org" as my home page, so I have to reset this.  Afterwards, everything works as expected and my Apache rewrites do their thing.

Second: I would like to allow the end user to fire up Palemoon from a batch file, like Apache and/or MySQL.  But I don't see any way to do so, which means I have to familiarize my users with the control panel (awkward.)

Third: If I try to open the Palemoon-Portable.exe file from a batch file, it opens but does not employ my rewrites and goes straight to the Internet.  Thereafter, running Palemoon from the Unicontroller panel also disregards the Apache rewrites and Palemoon preferences.  I have to reinstall Palemoon to return to normal use.

I'm assuming that I may need to use a separate browser, unless, of course, someone can point out the error of my ways...