I followed those steps on a fresh copy of 3.68 and didn't replicate the crash.
The WEB help entry didn't get created as a separate entry in the help file, not sure why that is - perhaps because WEB is already part of the keywords for the 'homepage' entry?
Hedit allowed me to edit existing, and create new, help file entries without crashing.
Maybe the next thing to check is that circle.exe has write access to the help file.
If you can see that it is successfully writing back to it, compare the hedit.c file with the latest release and see if there is anything different