yea I killed a NI boost controller, worked fine until it started shooting blue sparks between a couple of pins
the data sheet had a list of all the pins that were a max of 5 volts, except for one which we dropped 12 into, which apparently made it go nutty on its output
oh well, for the record the TI controllers are much nicer, the only way I have killed one of those was firing it up with no load or zener on its output, but it just failed gracefully