Originally Posted by HillRider
Your wheel should never come loose. If you have a quick release hub and the skewer is properly tightened the wheel will not move. If it is a nutted hub and the nuts are tight, the wheel won't move. If you have vertical dropouts the wheel really can't move except to fall out downwards. If this problem has happened to you twice in the past, you are doing something very wrong.
I am pretty sure that wheel alignment was not the ultimate cause. It may have just been a contributing factor. I must have just set my limiters very wrong (and its possible that I had made other adjustments to the wheel and didn't align it properly in one of the instances), and then they all added up with me overshifting or something and... krunch! So, I suppose that the best thing to do is just do a "once over" before ever ride to ensure that nothing has mysteriously gone out of whack (whether it results from my own carelessness, or sabatoge...)
Now that my settings are all set and happy, I went to take my bike for a winter bike ride to school this morning... only to discover that it sprung yet another leak in the self sealing back tire. (My guess is that this was due to not allowing the patch enough time to cure at room temperature before sending the bike back out to the sub zero weather outside. I also discovered yesterday that the self sealing feature seems to only work in warm weather... perhaps obvious things, but sometimes it takes a while to learn them). So... I'll have to have a look at that patch... and... yeah. Thanks for all your help guys.