2 things are going to kill your condenser (which is really just a capacitor)...too much heat or too much voltage (really common with a bad coil). If you run one above its intended temp range, it will degrade rapidly and failure will be guaranteed. If you feed it too much voltage, you'll ruin it by damaging the dielectric layer. A dead short with high voltage will also kill one, but that's not so common in a distributor (although by no means impossible). The other two things can happen, however. That's why I worked so hard to find components that were rated for high temp and a higher voltage. But any electrical component can fail.
