Enio,
I thought I should expand on what I've written above, which seems to contradict what Grant and "Evil Dr Ganymede" are discussing in
Smallest "earth-like" planet found
I was writing about the large effects that are easily measured on a day-to-day basis. They're writing about very, very tiny effects caused by tides. The results of these forces tend to be noticable only after a very, very long time.
Planets cause tides in the stars that they orbit around, just as the stars cause tides in the planets -- like the Sun does on the Earth. These tides cause the shapes of the star and the planet both to bulge slightly toward one another (and on the sides away from one another, too).
If the star rotates more rapidly than the planet orbits around it, then the star's tidal bulge will tend to be ahead of the planet in its orbit and will tend to pull the planet forward. The planet will be very slightly accelerated and its orbit will gradually become larger. (This same effect is happening between the Earth and the moon, for example. As a result, the moon's orbit is expanding at a rate of about 4cm per year. See
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~blackman/ast104/tides.html )
If the star rotates more slowly than the planet orbits around it, then the star's bulge will tend to be behind the planet in its orbit. The bulge will pull back on the planet. The planet will be very slightly decelerated, its orbit will gradually become smaller and, after a long time, the star eventually will eat the planet.
Also, since a planet's orbit is not perfectly circular, these effects will be stronger when the planet is closer to the star and weaker when the planet is farther away.
I won't try to write a formula here that might describe these effects. The effects are
extremely complicated
See
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Tide.html