Cron stopped working for d6 for 4.3.7

When I did an upgrade from 4.3.3 to 4.3.7 cron stopped working.
The cron goes via wget
http://<site>/sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/cron.php?name=<name>&pass=<pass>&key=<key>

When I debugged I found the following:
In CRM/Utils/System/Drupal6.php there is an error
It expects
$uid = user_authenticate(array('name' => $name, 'pass' => $pass));
to return a number, but in fact it returns an object: https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules!user!user.module/function/user_authenticate/6

user_load($uid) then fails, because that only accepts a number or an array.

And then civicrm give the error:
<br />Sorry, can not load CMS user account.

One solution is:
if (is_object($uid)) {
if ($uid->uid)

{ global $user; $user = $uid; return TRUE; }

}