I don't recall ever trying to reproduce this ancient bug report. I suspect that it's been moot for ages. 0.58 used Gtk 1.2, which I can't conveniently test with any more.
With both upstream 0.67 (latest release) and 0.61 (earliest release using Gtk2, so earliest I can still build), pterm -fn '-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1' followed by cat killpterm.txt doesn't cause any trouble for me. (On Ubuntu 14.04, not Debian.)
