Is it just the age of the unit after some number of miles, or other reasons?

A friend of mine has a 98 civic that had this failed on him shortly after he changed the distributor cap and rotor...and he cranked the engine (without the cap on) to line up the screw that holds the rotor so he can access it.

He claims that he had done this same thing many times before and never had a problem...so is this what caused the failure of the ICM? He's got over 200k on his car, so not sure what really have caused it to fail...

Thanks...