For those who didn't know, Zen Coding is a tool for creating html with a same kind of syntax, available for many editors: http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/
There are probably several other use-cases, but the one I've run into was where there is a naive implementation of alphabetic sorting (basically character by character sorting), zero padding allows proper numerical sorting to work:
001
002
010
022
Instead of:
1
10
2
22
If you think you might have a thousand items, you'd probably zero pad by 3 digits.
0001
0010
0100
1000
1001
Edit: of course, one area you're guaranteed to have trouble with numerical sorting is when your number is prefixed by a letter. Zero-padding mitigates that problem: M001, M002, M020, M023.