The problem was that the cold aura effect (like all effects) has a source entity. When the game would save and load, however, this source entity was getting lost. So, consequently, whenever you'd get struck, it would try to track back to the source, and this would result in a crash.
As far as using the savefile in 0.7.2, probably not. However, my guess is that it should work just fine in 0.7.3, which should be getting released in a day or so. So, just hold on to the save file for a couple days, and you'll be in business.
