The risk of burning is only one part of the problem, it only affects CPU that have millions and more millions of transistors. If you keep the temperature controlled it will not burn. If you use a CPU that doesn't require heatsink and fan, overclocking it will not burn it. If you overclock the memory it will not burn, you can double the FSB bus clock and it will cause no damge to the memory. The problem is other, it will not work at double speed.

The more serious and subtle problem of overclocking is malfunction. If the malfunction is serious your computer will crash or become unstable, but the malfunction can be small and only happen time to time and you don't notice that something is wrong. You zip a folder and burn it into a DVD for backup, a month later or more you discover that the zip file is corrupt and unusable, you blame the DVD media or the DVD writer. You save a 30 MB Poser pz3 and when open it later the pz3 makes Poser crash. The malfunction only put a strange character in the middle of deltas of some morph target, only one byte wrong amount 30 millions was enough (in other part of a pz3 file you can have several strange characters and nothing serious will happen). Of course, you will blame Poser, Windows or the hard disk.

Stupidity also evolves!