zoomkat, your answer makes sense, and seems closest to what I was reading about - but that seems to only apply if you are building a circuit, and apply power before you have connected the gate up (you are talking about a pull up/down resistor, in effect, right?). This makes sense, but it felt like what I was reading was saying not to install the MOSFET until you had the resistors in place, nothing about powering it up. Maybe I misread, or the author wasn't clear (it didn't seem right to me that something would spontaneously fail before you had everything hooked up).
Though - with what westfw is saying - maybe you need to have everything set up (resistor on gate) before connecting because of stray static charges causing the failure? It sounds like ultimately I need to keep myself well-grounded when working with these devices, while taking into account the gate resistor thing.
Thanks for the explanations.
