Risk is bad. But it doesn't have to kill you if you acknowledge, plan for and manage it. The most important part of risk management is to avoid the evil consequences as soon as you can in your project. Having risks show up the day before a delivery date (or later) is really really bad.
Both the Rational Unified Process and the Microsoft Solution Framework do good jobs at addressing perhaps one of the most important project management practices. I recommend to clients to make risk management a part of their team meetings - weekly if not more often. As a team, we need to identify, analyze and prioritize risks so that we can plan to deal with them effectively.
As part of identifying and analyzing risks is to accurate assess the consequences of the risk should it happen, and while this might seem silly, an accurate description of how we know the risk has turned into a problem. That may be a drop dead date, or some other description.
A good way to prioritize risks (using MSF) is to rank the impact of a risk should it actually happen. Combine that with a probability of the risk occurring and multiple them you get a probable impact or in MSF terms, Exposure. Ranking by Exposure will help you quickly identify what risks you should spend some resources on trying to mitigate.
All of this is described in more detail in the MSF Risk Management Discipline v. 1.1 pdf.
You can also download a couple of nice spreadsheets as part of the MSF Sample Project Lifecycle Deliverables which includes a huge array of other types of documents related to MSF. But I recommend starting with the Simple Risk Assessment Tool.xls at the very least.