I've got a rough idea, but no idea about the techniques.  I also have an out-standing question about the behavior of SPV clients like Multibit in some of these fork war scenarios.  No one has been inclined to comment.

I believe that the safest thing to do is to just sit on the sidelines and neither get rid of nor obtain Bitcoin if you are able to do this (e.g., you don't run a business which involves Bitcoin or whatever.)  If you wish to try to make some extra bucks then you would really have to understand things well and be paying attention...but what one person gains another loses so doing this may be closely related to theft.  Not sure yet.  It is unlikely that whatever fork survives (and I expect 'gavincoin' and 'mpcoin' to be just two of many vying for position) will not nuke value buried below the fork in the chain which makes sitting on your hands and waiting out the storm a pretty safe and low-overhead thing to do.

Some of the forks may eventually do a forced spend.  Of course you would just send money to yourself for the most part, but the transaction would be able to be re-played on other forks.  How big a deal that is is questionable because you would control the key to the receiving address.  If you have deeply buried coins then your spends should not contain any post-fork coinbase and be legal on most of the forks.  That gets back to my earlier musings about making cosmetic changes to legal/illegal address definitions.  In this way you could spend to a newly legal address, say, and the transaction could not be replayed on other forks.

Lots of this stuff is just theoretical and hand-waving on my part.  If/when a fork looks more eminent I'll be digging into it some more.  I've been concerned about the fork for a couple of years now, but it has come to naught so far.  But just the threat of it has been a force pushing me to draw down my stash when selling opportunities come about.  Seems that there is an up-swell in the Bitcoin Foundation interest in forking ASAP though.  It feels desperate and political more than technical to me.