One sensor failing should never hurt another sensor on the motor. When one sensor fails it may cause things that could cause other faults to appear.
For example you mention the crank sensor. Mine never died and needed to be restarted, but it did hiccup (technically a stall and restart on it's own). When it did this, the shifter light would blink on the console, the pcm tossed a code for being started in gear (which shouldn't be possible) and a few other funky related things happened. All could be tied back to a stall once that part was figured out.
If you suspect the crank sensor is failing and since it's a common issue, swap it out first. Then see if the other issues clear up because they were based on the bad crank sensor.
