The duplicate sprites in the talk menu are from the mod trying to update the old sprite nodes. The code is found in statstab.gd. There are 63 matches to 'pos1', which should all be 'slave'.
Viewing post in Aric's Expansion Rebred
If you edit the file in the mod folder rather than in the program folder, then you will indeed need to re-apply the mod. But there is no reason relevant to this that you would need to start a new save file, as it doesn't effect the save data. It shouldn't even require a restart of the program as returning to the main menu to re-apply the mod would reload the changed file.