I don't know if you can get elog to generate a log file - check the documentation, I don't bother.  But I do have some experience with this matter.

There are two related circumstances I know of that can arise which will cause elog to crash.

As you are probably aware, the entries are threaded.  I find the main problem is if you move a long thread - I forget the number but over 30 entries - from one log book to another, it will copy across fine, but the deletion of the thread from the source logbook will crash elog *before* the entire thread has been deleted: cause 1.

If you then restart elog, and happen to access the partially deleted thread, elog will run into a loop.  You won't be able to access elog, and you will see it is burning up CPU time, and it probably will eventually crash, but normally I find what the process number is and kill it (with "kill -9 [process no]").  This is cause 2.  The reason is that elog is looking for an entry number in the thread that no longer exists (because elog has already deleted it).

There is a moderately convoluted way I have devised to completely delete the partially deleted thread, needing access to the yymmdda.log files.  Cause 2 can also occur if someone manually edits yymmdda.log files with insufficient care (that includes me on occasion).