Excellent article, Ken. Your list should be part of every administrator's personal standard practices list, perhaps altered a bit for individual taste and installation specifics.

I also do full audits, but then every night I parse my error logs through a Perl script that ignores successful logins and gives me a text file of just SQL events and failed logins. I can always go back to the server log and check it for successful logins: we're almost exclusively 2000, so we don't do login audit triggers at this time.

I would add one thing for pre-2005 servers: create yourself an additional admin account in case something happens to your network login or you lose network connectivity and have to go local console. I like to use a strong password, sometimes completely random, for SA just to ensure it won't be used, so this serves as my back door when an admin connection can't be used.

And I'd add backing up the master, model, and msdb databases regularly. Great help for restoring systems.