I've owned an xbox 360 since the day it released and I've only had one red ring of death and it was on one of the first older models but it didn't happen until a year after I bought it and I attempted to fix it myself with that stupid kit you can buy off ebay with changing the thermal paste adding a few small heatsinks to some other chips and changing the washers but that worked for only hours and went back to red ring.
I had no choice but to send it into microsoft but by then I lost the seal I took off and messed up the casing so I had to buy a new case and seal and put the guts in the new case and swap the serial and other stickers from my old case to the new one and put the seal back and finally sent it in and got a different refurb xbox back the next week.
horrible day...haven't had any problems with my new one though, just flashed it too.
Ive had it happen to my Xbox 360 twice. And I also had it happen to my PS3. Not the red ring of death but the yellow flashing power light (fried cpu). So im on Xbox 360 number 3 and PS3 number 2. $1700.00 later (should've bought a gaming PC)