I tried another re-install of moodle 1.3 and it went on smoothly on FC2. The steps taken before going to the usual browser pointing to the moodle address were:
(i) changed the 'memory =8M to 16M in php.ini'
(ii) renamed 'recent_activity' to 'xrecent_activity' under blocks menu
After finishing the initial setup, renamed the xrecent_activity back to recent_activity.
All the logs are now showing up as expected.