I do not find it necessary to adjust the colours, but I take my photos in AdobeRGB and have a calibrated monitor that displays 90% of the AdobeRGB colour space.

If you are taking in ARGB and displaying on an sRGB monitor, this may explain your problem, possibly. The main thing is to ensure you calibrate it and be consistent.

I turn sharpening and colour noise reduction to zero in CS3 raw and sharpen as a last action using routines that employ Unsharp mask.

You could buy 'Real World Image sharpening in Adobe CS2' by Bruce Fraser. It is a truely interesting book devoted entirely to the art of sharpening images. It can be found on Amazon for about Ł17, a great buy. It applies to CS3 as well.

I also save to 16 bit tif files with no compression. I print from tif and only use jpeg for 1024x768 projected digital images or for Flickr and for here.

If you really want to get the best from your images and I assume you do as you are using raw, another great book is:

Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Photographers by Martin Evening. Martin and Bruce were collegues and think along similar lines, so both books compliment each other. This is also available on Amazon for about Ł17.00. An invaluable resource and very helpful with all aspects of CS3 clearly explained. Comes with a CD full of video tutorials. Can you tell, I'm a fan!!

The sharpening routines can be saved as 'Actions' simplifying their application. If you add pauses in the right places, you can tweak the settings for each image.