LR doesn’t care what you set the camera to do except for White Balance.  The camera settings only affect the camera JPGs  The Adobe raw engine has its own settings. 

The settings you describe for the 40D are the factory (Adobe) defaults for Process Version 2010 and before in LR 3.6 and before. 

The 5D would use the same settings, I believe, but perhaps the factory defaults are different for the 5D (which would be news to me), or perhaps you’ve changed the defaults, which are managed specific to a camera model, and optionally to a camera serial number and ISO setting, or perhaps you’ve processed those images in LR4 which has the new Process Version 2012 and toning defaults of zeros, not that these are a lot different than PV2010 defaults, just that Adobe choose to make their factory defaults read zeros instead of other numbers.

If that's your preferred starting point, rather than mess with all the Adobe Defaults why not simpy apply the "General Zeroed" preset on import?

Diver Mike wrote:

 

Ok, thank you. I figured it out just now. You just zero out everything. No tone curve, zero contrast, zero Sat, no noise reduction etc. THEN, (using LR3.6), you go to your main tool bar, at the top of LR, click on Develop, then Set Default Settings, and then your done. Everything will be at zero.

Well, just don't expect that setting to be neutral. The LR default is at least an attempt to create something that will appear neutral, but even that setting will often need more contrast and colour to actually appear neutral.

So why not create a preset which comes close to a neutrally looking image instead of just zeroing everything out?