Comment 6 for bug 279791

>Why would displaying the log make it crash?

No idea yet, if you could attach to this bug report your /var/log/messages file this could give me some clues.
If you have edited your conky.conf file, or created a new one, attaching these should also be helpful.
Can you also tell me which command line options you use when calling conky?

Thanks for any help you can give.