haha i hear you on this one. see what happens when you put 5000A in a 500us pulse across a cm300 1200v 300A igbt for 1/2 hour straight
Anyway, to answer your question, i have actually had a couple of linear regulators that actually exploded in my face but i found a similarity in all of them. they were all connected to a very large filter capacitor and i noticed that when they failed they went short circuit to the ground pin and the capacitor unleashed it's fury into the regulator and blew it to smithereens.