Since we are trading anecdotes, here's mine: http://lwn.net/Articles/350072/ - loss of thousands of files and LVM metadata corruption on a PC using ext3 on top of LVM.
This PC was frequently reset accidentally by the user pressing the power button, which caused at least one data loss event within one year. Since disabling write caching (and a couple of other changes) I've not had any data loss on this PC, but it's probably too early to be sure these changes have fixed the problem.
FWIW, I believe that at least on this setup, disabling write caching helps avoid ext3 and LVM corruption.