I am confused. I do not personally care for the new interactive split tool, but if it is going to crash it would crash while in the act of using it.

I don't believe the fact that you cut an edge using it would crash your machine after the act and you are no longer using the tool. Once an edge is split it's split. It Does not matter if you used the new interactive split tool or the old split tool.

I mean if you exported / saved the mesh and brought it into a fresh scene maya would have no recollection that you had used the interactive split polygon tool on anything.

So it sounds like there is a problem when maya is trying to run a smooth preview on your model. You might want to turn on the stack trace and see if you can capture where you are crashing in the code.

If I misinterpreted your message I apologize.