i am familiar with that method - and it's no myth either, i could hardly believe it when my brother pulled it off with his 8800 right in front of me (he almost didn't really believe it either)
it worked - but... a few months later and the card died out on him again... so i figure, specially now that we have DX11 and shader model 4 coming up, there's no point in delaying the inevitable fate that eventually befalls all hardware... if my 8800 is dead, i'll just get a new card and let "nature" run it's course :-?
of course... if i do bake it, i get a free secondary card, which opens up for 2 more monitor

- if my girlfriend doesn't murder me for doing so first

but what about the tweaking? was in just a coincidence that my card went down while i was testing new stuff?
- another note-worthy fact:
FSX DID start and ran for just under one minute with the newly installed tweaks before it all went south... i would expect that if the tweaks were in fact, the cause of the fault, it would have blown up right at the rendering of the first frame, no?
what do you think?