Yes. This is a thing. And uh, don't try to spawn in stuff like that.
With bugs, generally they are caused by conflicts in game files. Try disabling any recently added mods. If that doesn't work, disable all mods then reinstall them one by one to see which one is causing the conflict. Otherwise one of the game files might me corrupted, in which you should redownload the game.
EDIT: Somehow this text got jumbled...
I haven't seen it happen in a while but every once in a while (About 1/2 of the time), if I killed a lureplant that I hadn't encountered before, the game would stop, the message 'Don't Starve.exe has stopped working' would appear, and I would be booted back to the desktop.
You need to tell us if you have any mods enabled or if you've changed the gamefiles in any way, since most of the time this is the problem. There is always the rare chance that something outside of the game is causing it to crash, like a failing graphics card, but usually with this it wouldn't be consistent on killing Plant Bulbs. Like I said, disable all mods and try again.
...But this WAS before (about a month) we found out the laptop had a virus that required it to be wiped back to just-out-of-the-factory level so, yeeaaaah...
Never touched the files, either. It was probably the virus, since I haven't seen it happen since then.
Yeah, if you had a virus, you'd wanna redownload all the files again (or validate files if you use Steam). Make sure you backup your saves beforehand though.