Surge protectors and power conditioners - Good idea or bad?

I have to ask what are the impacts when your equipment is receiving clean power. 

Rare to get hit by lightning? Guess that depends on where you live. Here in central Florida you can depend on your home's power lines being hit by electrical surges caused by lighting every few years. While a direct lightning strike to a home's power inlet is probably going to overwhelm any surge protection, surge protection for my audio equipment has protected and saved my audio equipment from damaging surges that burned out unprotected circuits like garage doors and doorbells. As to negatively affecting sound quality, there isn't any definitive answer. Some components (most often power amps in my experience) are negatively affected by power conditioners while everything else in the system is usually positively affected. As always, experimentation is in order and what works in one situation isn't going to necessarily be the case in another. 

What a surprise the "surge" burned out things like garage doors and doorbells that are not fused. The real reason people use surge protectors is FUDD stories just like this one. 

The reality is if you get hit by lightning, good luck if your system is the way when the megavolts burn their path to ground. Anything less than that you have this thing called a fuse. 

Of course this is electronics we are talking about. Someone somewhere always gonna have something get blown out by the static charge you get walking across carpet, blow the instant it is turned on, or just plain give up the ghost for who knows what reason. By and large though surge is like the other "s" word, snow. Everyone freaks, but then life goes on- until they hear the "s" word and freak out all over again.

+1 for @photon46