Don't forget rounding errors.
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also. if you have a walloping great big peak in your recording, normalizing will retain that massive peak exactly but scale the entire waveform up so that the peak goes to 0 dB and no further. therefore if the rest of your recording was going at -10 dB roughly and you had a great big spike that shot up to -1dB. normalising it would hardly increase the level of the track at all. if you wanted to get rid of that peak you would have to either notch EQ it out or compress the waveform so it reduces the dynamic range of the audio.
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For troublesome spikes, I just import the audio into a wave-editor (wavelab, sound forge, cool edit, etc.), and zoom in and manually pick out the spikes and just pull them down alone. Ie. by highlighting the spike, and then normalising the spike by -10dB (or whatever the average dB level is either side of the peak). With Cool Edit you can simply zoom in and grab the offending spike points and pull them down to any desirable level with your mouse.
Voila, instant headroom, and no need to process the rest of the surrounding waveform. The less haphazard utilitarian processing the better.