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I'm curious about this too -- I've used MyISAM for many projects without a problem.

The two ways I've experienced:

1. Yank power cord while db writes are happening.

2. Grow the tables over a couple of GB in size.

MyISAM is like the ext2 filesystem. You crash and you end up spending a long time doing an fsck, where you have to verify the consistency by walking all the data structures. InnoDB is more like ext3, where you can make things consistent by replaying the changes in the journal. Doing repair on a large MyISAM table can take hours and hours.