I guess I found the problem.
Very likely the old screen had serious issues and calibrated wrong. I don't know if this is technically possible, but, for now, that's my explanation.
(how do I know that? The new screen looked exactly the same like the old one with the old calibration/profile. Only the new profile was very, very different).
The new calibration showed a yellow cast in DPP's conversions.
It turned out that they are indeed quite yellow, but for some reason, the old, wrong calibration with the old monitor gave the images a more pleasing appearance (by actually having a red cast, which is not as ugly for people like a yellow cast) out of the box than the new, right calibration.
I will need to create a new preset (picture style in DPP's language), that gives a more balanced appearance upon import.
Key will be test prints I'm going to do soon.
But as the colors of DPP and their import into Photoshop CS3 match for the first time really well, I seem to be on the right path.
The fact that the new screen dims down to under 120cd2 still puzzles me. (It's my third screen on this iMac. The first had a faulty inverter board and hummed, the second had uneven lighting - right side darker than the left, and, as it shows, equally unreliable colors - if that's technically possible for an LCD screen to be impossible to calibrate).
The new screen could be a panel from a later production and maybe this is the reason why it dims down more. I have done lots of warm-up, and still, the lower brightness stays. Maybe I got lucky this time and got a really good screen. Test prints will show.
PS: I threw out the preferences files for DPP, which didn't change a bit.
I guess this was kind of a two pipe problem, Sherlock Holmes-wise, who was lucky enough to never have to investigate color management problems.