All righty then! Thanks for the education. This is an excellent program that I've been using for over a decade!
This is expected behavior, even if it seems unusual. Invoke Astrolog with "=b" instead of "-b". The -b switch to calculate using accurate ephemeris files is a toggle, and ephemeris files are on by default (see inside your astrolog.as default settings file) so -b by itself will usually turn ephemeris files off. Remember that for the command line, the "=" prefix forces a setting on regardless of its previous value, the underscore prefix forces a setting off, and the standard "-" and "/" prefixes toggle...
Playing around with this, it seems to ONLY happen with the -n flag. displaying an individual natal chart seems to work fine with -b.
not working with -b