IPS patches

You can apply as many patches as you want to a ROM without expanding it. The problem will be patches conflicting with each other. And as you know, it will corrupt your ROM. The "Flawless Victory" patch conflicts with pretty much every patch known to man, as do many others. My advice to you, would be to get a group of patches together that you want to use, and download this awesome new tool by mblock129 that will tell you if any of them are conflicting with each other. I have not used the tool yet, but I'm sure it's easy enough.
http://zephyr129.brinkster.net/patchconflict.html