I really have to apologize for this continuing frustration. I ran Recuva in debug mode as you said, but there was no log file created! From what I read about running in debug mode, the log file is supposed to be created as soon as the app is started, and in the same dir as the exe. There are only 2 files in c:\program files\recuva - recuva.exe and uninst.exe
It was indeed running in debug mode, as indicated by the [debug] after the version number.