Only issue I've ever had in doing this is where the drive had corruption on it and the resize then failed. You can then end up in a situation where the partition table shows an expanded drive, but windows still only shows the original drive size.
I've fixed it every time by shrinking and re-expanding again.
However if I'd chkdsked the drive first the problem would have been avoided. Lesson learnt....
I've never trashed a drive doing it, but I guess theres always a first time.....Mixtures concerns about backups are very valid