Yes there's a risk with games that include DRM but, to quote police squad "You take a chance getting up in the morning, crossing the street or sticking your face into a fan". The odds of a DRMed game destroying an optical drive or otherwise causing hardware damage is very probably less than a plane crashing on you while you're in the bath.
You can't just assume that a problem is related to DRM when it's an extremely small element of a very large and complex system where every part must interact in harmony in order to get anything done. Sure DRM can ruin this harmony and no doubt does sometimes but then every single other element can have the same problems.
I've been doing IT in one form or another for decades and I know from LONG experience that very few people really how to use a computer properly and fewer still know how to troubleshoot properly. People hear "DRM broke my computer", see the problem they have bears a superficial similarity to the described one, see the game has the same DRM scheme and they therefore conclude that DRM caused it which is specious reasoning at best.
I rely on my computer for practically everything, entertainment, uni work and contact with the woman I love so it's pretty damned important to me. Risk management is a fairly subjective thing but if you were to build a risk table of probability of damage times magnitude of damage, DRM would be on the lower half of the table because the chances of occuring with serious hardware damage are so extremely small.
Sure there's SHITLOADS of potential for privacy damage but thats a different argument

I think it was more an issue that the process of cracking it brought to light information about how it operated and the troubles it could case. There were the immediate upfront troubles, such as the early versions of Starforce simply not allowing games to be played on 64 bit WinXP systems. However, there was also the more insidious matter of Starforce occasionally dropping CD drives from DMA to PIO mode. In addition to making read/write speeds much slower, some drives aren't supposed to run in PIO mode, and forcing the drive into this mode could end up causing physical damage to the drive over time. It naturally took a while for this issue to come to light (since it took time for things to start breaking), and for the general gaming public that wasn't interested in the technical details, it was simply a matter of "Starforce breaks your computer."
Causing actual damage to a computer is pretty rare for DRM, though, as you already mentioned, with the far more common issue with it being that at some point people simply aren't able to use the product they purchased. This issue is one that is unfortunately far too common, with Securom being one of the worst offenders in this area (also, on the note of Securom, there have been a few reports that the latest version of Securom is doing the old Starforce DMA to PIO stepdown, so that might be one to watch out for in the future).
And Blarg, opposition to DRM really should be taken as a practical matter. Ultimately DRM decreases the value of a product, due to the potential liabilities in introduces; it falls to each individual to simply evaluate just how much these liabilities decrease the value for them, and based on that decide whether the asking price for the product is worth it. This is why people will often be willing to put up with some types of DRM, but not others, or be willing to put up with DRM when a product is fairly cheap (as long as the DRM isn't so troublesome as to decrease the value of the product below zero).

Hardware damage sound like a myth, but I've had first-hand experience with DRM screwing up my DVD drivers to the point where you couldn't read any disks, unless you booted with them in the drive. (Courtesy of SecuROM.)

BioShock. Bough it,installed it, had no issues playing it. Changed video card and drivers, no issues. Added another hard drive (not a new drive for the OS, but a second drive for the OS)... locked out of the game. Now that they've finally lifted the activation limits, I can likely play it again. But I don't know if I even want to now. That was my first run-in with SecuROM's limited activations feature. As a result, I research any potential game purchase to see what DRM, if any, is being used. Anything similar to what's on BioShock is now an instant 'no buy' for me.
I've not had a hardware failure due to DRM, but I've also never had a StarForce game on my rig. Call me paranoid.
Crashes? Can't say, but I've had lockups due to DRM. An update to SecuROM in NWN2 caused hard lockups if you right-clicked an .exe file while in Windows Explorer. This was eventually fixed by an update to SecuROM by SonyDADC. But it wasn't due to general system instability. It was the DRM on the game.
I don't buy into much of the hysteria about DRM, but I've had my fill of actual problems with it, and I also do believe that some of the reports of hardware failure due to DRM are true (although I also think the number of cases are far fewer than people think, due to the reiteration of the stories over the internet). Couple that with my philosophical objections to it as well, and I just don't buy games with intrusive (some call it draconian) DRM such as internet connections required to play single player games and limited activations.

They wrote that and still require that you have SDC/Impulse running when you install games (atleast the ones I've bought) and that to me is pretty apparent DRM.

then what does't count as drm as this entire drm topic is kind of going round in circles

While having to have use impulse to install games bought through it may certainly be considered an annoyance, it really doesn't fit any meaningful definition of DRM. Now, if Impulse was required for verification when you wanted to play the games then it could be considered DRM, but as it stands it's simply a bloated distribution system and installer. Calling it DRM really does nothing more than confuse what DRM is, making discussion of actual DRM more difficult and confusing.

I disagree. Even though it might be on the lighter side of the spectrum having to use a special application and connect to an authentication server for installation is to me a meaningful definition of DRM. Would you say that windows comes without DRM? It works in the same way, activate on install and authenticate for updates.
darthcobley- GOG is a good example.
And to answer the original question, no. Very few games worthy of mention let alone money, hiddeously slow to download from and SDC (may it remain dead) was horrid. While their setup might have changed, I hope it has, they had at the time of my purchase two server connecting to europe delivering no more than 50KB and I had 1,8GB to download...

Impulse isnt allowing backup the 3rd party games isnt it like Steam? I want to buy Supreme Commander series but I am curious about this issue.

I haven't tried this with some of my other games, but there are a few third party games on steam that don't actually require you to be logged into steam when you run them, typically anything using dosbox.

To what extent does Impulse authenticate applications purchased through it? (Honest question, I actually don't know). Is there even a separate authorization check following the download? Applications that work through Impulse but which you can purchase a physical copy of (Sins, GalCiv, etc) don't require Impulse to be installed or any kind of authentication (hell, after the initial installation even applications purchased through Impulse don't require that it be installed). And does restoring archived applications require any sort of activation before they'll run? The only case in which you can even begin to shoehorn Impulse into the definition of DRM is the requirement that all updates be through Impulse, although even this is stretching the definition of DRM (almost akin to saying GOG has DRM because you need to be logged in to download the bonus materials). Understand that I have no particular love for Impulse, I'm just opposed to the term "DRM" being thrown around so easily that it loses all meaning.

Then why the fiddelyfewy are you arguing with me if you dont even know how it works?!?!
For your education then. You have to be online, logged in to your SDC/Impulse account to:
-Install
-Restore backups
-Patch
I think they are trying to pull a fast one with the "Gamers Bill of Rights" and "we dont do DRM" stance. I much prefer GOG (null DRM through and through) or Steam (with a reservation for shipping games with more than their own DRM now) where there is no doubt of what you are getting.

While I do like Impulse, I do think that the bill of rights thing is a crock of shit and that it's just a way to make Stardock look like they care about gamers. Which they're not.

While I'd say Stardock may well care about gamers a lot more than the likes of EA, their "bill of rights" and the like doesn't look nearly so high and mighty with GOG on the scene. One of the things I like the most about GOG is that patches and other updates don't require any sort of fancy license authentication process or middleman utility. If I want to I can even use my own choice of download manager to get the files.
While Sins and the like are good offerings and work fine right out of the box, you must use Impulse to get patches and other content. How do you install the latest patched version of Sins in five years? How about ten? Companies offering products like this often promise to release some sort of unlocking patch if they end up folding, but that doesn't earn much trust from me; give me the unfettered version now, and then we'll talk about how great the long-term customer service is.

I have a general understanding of it, but I haven't done any in depth exploration of its workings under different conditions, such as testing which functions do and do not work when it is not allowed to connect to the internet.
Given this, I'd agree to an extent that Impulse can be considered a form of light DRM, due to the verification requirement on reinstall/restore.
I agree that with regards to Impulse Stardock is being somewhat two-faced in their "no DRM" talking points, and I'm personally not particularly thrilled that they are no longer releasing stand-alone patches. Although they still seem to be taking a pretty good approach with the lack of DRM on physical copies of their products.