Never actually fried one, but it's a bad idea hotplugging PS/2 or Game Port devices, they're designed to be connected before the computer powers on.

20 years of doing this and it's never happened before.

What I did do once was zap a sound card by hot-plugging an audio connector which had some sort of earthing problem. I stopped doing that a while ago. But joysticks never a problem.

You can hot-plug joysticks no problem, I do it all the time.

I would guess there's something wrong with the joystick. A short or something.

A joystick is just a simple passive circuit. I don't see why hot-plugging would cause problems under normal circumstances. Never did for me anyway.

I took the stick apart and don't see any visible damage. Still the smell is very strong. Strange. It's completely dead of course.

Check the potentiometers with a multimeter.

Errius wrote:

I just fried a joystick by hot-plugging it into a Sound Blaster 16. Strong smell of burning from the stick. I don't know if the card is also damaged. I didn't know this was dangerous. Has anyone had similar experiences?

Plugged an Amiga joystick into a COM port, back in the golden 80's.
Nothing prior to USB are really hot-plugable, unless it was expensive back when new.

The floppy controller, the game port and possibly the COM and LPT ports (not sure about the last two, it was some 25 years ago) on an ISA multi-IO card god fried when I hot-plugged a joystick into our family 386. The IDE controller part kept on working. The IO controller was UMC-based . The joystick was made by Suncom (cannot remember the model, sorry) and survived unscathed.