I guess Brother's In Arms is responsible for my old original elite RRODing then? Not the fact that it's motherboard was a Zephyr which had a 200-odd Watt power supply and was basically guaranteed to fail at some point because of the shoddy manufacturing.....

If your 360 is an old one then it's more likely to RROD at some point, especially if you ram the power brick in a confined space with no air getting to it!

Original 360's use the 'Xenon' chipset. Original Elite's use the 'Zephyr' chipset. Then came 'Falcon', 'Opus' and finally the 'Jasper', each using reduced power supplies. The new S model 360's have a completely redesigned chipset and basically shouldn't RROD now. A Jasper shouldn't RROD either really if you look after it properly.

To say NV has RRODed your xbox is rubbish. I've been playing the same save files between my two 360's (Halo Reach S console downstairs, Resident Evil 5 Jasper console upstairs) for a total of around 140hours now, I've had multiple crashes that've resulted in me having to reboot the console and I've had no RRODs.

I've had a 360 of some description since Feb 06 and have had a grand total of 1 RROD in that time simply because I keep the console & power brick well ventilated.

I think it's more luck than looking after your 360.
I've had a total of 6 consoles in 4 years, one had a dvd drive die when it was 3 days old!
A couple had overheating problems, despite being very well ventilated, and 3 RROD's.
Before you tell me i didn't look after them, my jasper died after 7 months, and i'm on another one, and they were both well ventilated.
Don't try and tell me what well ventilated is either, my employment background includes various jobs working in electronics, tech support etc, and i've built dozens of PC's, some of which are 10+ years old and still running fine, although slow! LOL
I know how to look after my electronics, i think some people are just luckier than others.
I still repair and mod PC's as well as build them in my spare time, and now i'm doing x-clamp fixes for people's xboxs too. It only costs a couple of pounds for the parts, and i do the work for free as it for friends. The box's i've fixed are still running fine after a couple of months, but the lack of decent airflow through the case is astounding for a tech savvy company like MS.
I know people have had no problems with the 360's, and good luck to them, but a lot of us aren't as lucky. No matter how well we look after our equipment.
The 360 is infamous for it's overheating, so to say it's how people look after them, when it's clearly a design flaw is misleading at best. The whole thing heats up, the motherboard stays aren't all level, which makes the board flex, then the original x-clamps bend it further right over the die of the chips, followed by the poor fan, and various ways for the airflow to be interfered with further and you have a recipe for cooking chips! Which is why MS had to give a 3 year RROD warranty. They wouldn't do that if it was user negligence. The 360 while it's a good console when it works, is fatally flawed in respect to it's heat management issues.

Closed for review - there is some very sketchy "advice" in here. And a specific game will not cause the RROD.

You're indeed correct. Software can't ruin hardware, it's impossible.

RROD (and Error E74) happens because the graphic chip in the 360 gets too hot and create solder issues with the motherboard. The exact same reason why the PS3 get YLOD as well. If you have an older 360 or PS3 model, this is bound to eventually happen. The hardware simply generate too much heat to be confined in a relatively small box. The newer models is much more energy efficient and generate noticeably less heat, though, so they are more reliable, but it might still happen in some extreme cases.

In any case, RROD is a wellknown 360 issue and Microsoft happily deal with it, so contact the Microsoft support and they will help you.