Sometime passed build 840 (I think) I noticed the logging to eqemu\*.log files are now generating tons of good info. Not sure if I just missed it before, or if it got turned back on. Waht I saw when I posted this was the zone or world startup, and then no subsequent log entries until I restarted the services - then new logs were created, of course.
Now it's behaving differently. And I get what I think I need from the logging. And I guess there are in-game log subscriptions too that spit out tons of info and generally crash my zones.
It's all good. I'm trying to track down why, when someone does a high volume of damage, a zone will throw an exception and kick everyone out. Hopefully logs will tell me something.