Finding dead pixels (permanently stuck off) would presumably be similar to the procedure for looking for dirt, except that you wouldn't want to stop the lens down, just OOF picture of a uniformly bright field. (That's good, when I first started thinking about this I was afraid that the dead pixel test would mean looking for dirt and scrubbing and scrubbing until there were those few you just couldn't get rid of :-)
Anyhow, I don't seem to have *any* hot pixels on the istD, and my Oly C5050 had them and my Nikon Coolpix 800 had them in spades.
You'd hope a procedure for mapping out bad pixels would start from scratch each time you ran it. The C5050 manual recommended doing it something like once a year, but I think it may have more to do with how quickly they go bad than anything else.
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Alan P. Hayes
Meaning and Form: Writing, Editing and Document Design
Pittsfield, Massachusetts
Photographs at http://www.ahayesphoto.com/americandead/index.htm
