Drupal admin area and login, Securing them with HTTPS I've been reading a lot about this and trying many of the methods I've found and haven't yet been able to get anything working properly.

I want to be able to secure the admin area and associated login pages. So anything in example.com/admin/* or example.com/user/* etc, needs to go over SSL/TLS. We'd like this to apply to each site withing the multisite setup. So example1.com, example2.com, example3.com are all on the same server/user account. 

The Setup


Drupal 7 multi site
Clean URLs enabled
PHP 5.3 
MySQL v14 d5
Apache2


Notes


Securepages is not an option, as there's no stable Drupal 7 release, and using the existing dev version requires patching Drupal Core, which goes against our policy
Have tried Session 443 with no success
Have tried Secure Login with no success
An SSL cert (a self-signed one for now, while testing) is installed and works on the server for other purposes, just not Drupal. 
I've read all the docs on Drupal.org about enabling HTTPS and have attempted to follow the directions there with little success
I've toggled the $conf['https'] setting in settings.php with no discernable results.


The Questions

If I enable HTTPS for everything on a site, I get a 404 for anything attempting to go through https://, which leads me to think that the rewrite rules aren't applying for the https pages. What am I missing here? Is there a rewrite condition/rule I can add to htaccess to fix this?

Is this not a solved problem in the Drupal community? Are people just leaving their admin areas unsecured, with user passwords being sent in the clear? I find this hard to believe, yet it seems that there's no built-in or commonly known solution to the problem.
It's not the question you asked, but the simplest answer is you should just change your policy.

"Hacking" core (patching it) and running unstable releases is reality of running a website. 

The two patches needed for securepages frequently need re-rolls, reviews, or improvements. Get involved in that cycle and help get them stable.