I've done lots of messing and testing to get this to work, and here's the issue.
I've had pidgin crashing a lot, probably a plugin but I'm trying to debug and find out.
To get pidgin to log, you need to use the following switches: "-d 2>&1 > PATH:\To\debug.log when launching pidgin.
The NSIS launcher somehow doesn't pass these correctly. It will create the debug.log, where you have specified, but it still opens a command prompt window and doesn't write any output to the debug.log.
I've verified that this does work with a local copy of pidgin, launching with those parameters. I even went and modified the launcher to include "-d 2>&1 > debug.log" and found the same issue.
Not sure how this could/needs to be solved, but it certainly isn't working now 
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If you modded the launcher and it has the same issue, it could be that the settings used for making it portable don't work properly with logging. The other option is to see if it is the UPX compression. Copy your local copy of Pidgin into App\Pidgin and rename pidgin.exe to pidgin-portable.exe. Then try it again.
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Just so it's here, what we talked about in IRC.
The launcher has the same issues with or without quotes, and even using the same string that I use in my batch file to launch pidgin the way it should be with debug, I have the same issue I mentioned.
This will never work - redirecting stdout to a file (
>) is a command-line extension, so it won't work with NSIS's Exec command - it'll pass it to the program rather than saving the contents of stdout to the file as you want. The reason it won't work with PidginPortable.exe is because it doesn't catch and feed the contents of stdout.The only real way you can do this is something like:
Unfortunately, with the standard NSIS_MAX_STRLEN value of 1024 it's unlikely to be very useful (it'll only catch the first KB of debug messages).
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