From No CSS Reset by Jonathan Snook:

“The problem I’ve had with these resets is that I then find myself declaring much more than I ever needed to just to get browsers back to rendering things the way I want. As it turns out, I’m perfectly happy with how a number of elements render by default. I like lists to have bullets and strong elements to have bolded text.”

I echo that declaration. I too used to start my stylesheet with the famous

* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }

The I found that I was putting back the same formatting that was already set by default on most of the elements.

As for building a base CSS stylesheet, I do have one but it mostly only contains the main separations for a site like #header, #content, etc…