You really should be fine waiting a week, just monitor the dw-maint post to see if there are any lingering issues and just make sure no new tags show up with the minor ( that is 1.0.x -- the x changing ) different.

6. You should not be overriding any files, really -- because you will miss out on any changes, and they could cause incompatibilities -- besides the config files.

What are you overriding? -- anything that DW has needed to should have a local component or a hook.

6b. See:

http://hg.dwscoalition.org/dw-nonfree/file/6883b468b6b7/schemes/_dreamwidth.tt
http://hg.dwscoalition.org/dw-nonfree/file/6883b468b6b7/schemes/gradation-vertical-local.tt
http://hg.dwscoalition.org/dw-nonfree/file/6883b468b6b7/cgi-bin/DW/Hooks/SiteScheme.pm

And then use grad-vertical-local in all your config places.

But any file you create yourself should be in your cvs/<blah> directory.

7. You should also do that to the closest tag before [tagname] ( or past, if there's a different minor ) in:

dw-free
bml
js
perlbal
s2

8. No, compare the config files with 'hg diff -r <last tag> etc/config.pl' ( and the same with the two templates in doc ) and merge in any relevant looking changes ( new options, etc... )

11. Yep, and you can 'cvsreport.pl --diff filename' if you want to see what changed.