What is the possibility that mirroring a database will damage, corrupt, or erase either the primary or target database? The last time my company had tried to mirror some databases, everything worked great until one morning they came in and the primary database in one of the mirroring schemes was just blank.  They had no errors or anything to point them to a reason of why this happened.  Since then, the company has not tried mirroring since it is not great for high availability if it just kills the primary database in the mirror setup.  The mirror was on SQL-Server 2005 (most likely).  I don't have any other information other than that because of how long ago this problem occurred. 

The current setup that we are going to possibly use for mirroring will consist of SQL servers 2008, 2008 r2, 2012.  Do problems like the one mentioned happen frequently or has Microsoft improved their logic enough to rule out these possibilities for the most part?  Do problems with erasing and corruption happen more frequently when the servers are on different version of SQL Server?  Has anyone else ever had a similar problem with a nailed down cause?

Any insight or expertise would be appreciated since I cannot locate anyone who has had a similar problem yet.
I appreciate that you are looking for anecdotes about the experience of using mirroring; however this site is not really the place for opinion.
Having said that, you may find the following excerpt from Microsoft.com regarding database mirroring helpful:
Database mirroring is a simple strategy that offers the following benefits:

Increases availability of a database.


In the event of a disaster, in high-safety mode with automatic failover, failover quickly brings the standby copy of the database online (without data loss). In the other operating modes, the database administrator has the alternative of forcing service (with possible data loss) to the standby copy of the database.


Increases data protection.


Database mirroring provides complete or almost complete redundancy of the data, depending on whether the operating mode is high-safety or high-performance.
A database mirroring partner running on SQL Server 2008 Enterprise or later versions automatically tries to resolve certain types of errors that prevent reading a data page. The partner that is unable to read a page requests a fresh copy from the other partner. If this request succeeds, the unreadable page is replaced by the copy, which usually resolves the error. For more information, see Automatic Page Repair (Availability Groups/Database Mirroring).


Improves the availability of the production database during upgrades.


To minimize downtime for a mirrored database, you can sequentially upgrade the instances of SQL Server that are hosting the failover partners. This will incur the downtime of only a single failover. This form of upgrade is known as a rolling upgrade. For more information, see Install a Service Pack on a System with Minimal Downtime for Mirrored Databases.

Paul Randal's sqlskills.com blog offers an excellent set of articles about mirroring at http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/category/database-mirroring/
Glenn Berry offers up some pertinent tips for running mirroring at http://sqlserverperformance.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/sql-server-database-mirroring-tips-and-tricks-part-1/