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What I'm wondering about if a heavier wheel in the fork would cause undue stress or vibration through the frame, thereby destroying a light road frame.
No. The thing which breaks frames is having the rim hit the scenery because you've blown through the suspension travel provided by the pneumatic tyre. The amount of load the tyre can put into the frame as long as the air cushion is still working is limited to a function of the hoop stress in the tyre carcase, which is in turn is dependent on the pressure and cross section diameter. Wider tyres could put higher loads into the frame if they were run at the same pressure as narrower ones, but they usually aren't; in fact carcase hoop stress tends to be quite consistent over a wide range of tyre cross sections for a given load, because typical pressure settings are roughly inversely proportional to cross section diameter.
If you brake hard while leaning over on a wide tyre, you can twist the fork more than you would on a narrow tyre, but you feel that as torque steer; if you can resist it with some steering input to the bars it's not doing any harm, and if you can't resist it you fall off :-)
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gbj_tester
JWestland
fizzy.bleach
What I'm wondering about if a heavier wheel in the fork would cause undue stress or vibration through the frame, thereby destroying a light road frame.
In theory all the forces are via the rotational direction of the wheel, it's heavier, has more inertia but in theory that all goes via fork legs which can take it, but roads/tyres etc. aren't perfect. So there could be some "sideways" forcing on the HT.
If the wheel is slightly out do you get shear on the HR? Do pothole cause shear? Can this cause forces higher than what the HT is built for?
(apologies for not technically perfect language)