Tighten up a lot of casts from unsigned to int which are read by one

Tighten up a lot of casts from unsigned to int which are read by one
of the GET_32BIT macros and then used as length fields. Missing bounds
checks against zero have been added, and also I've introduced a helper
function toint() which casts from unsigned to int in such a way as to
avoid C undefined behaviour, since I'm not sure I trust compilers any
more to do the obviously sensible thing.

[originally from svn r9918]