Although the crowd.home setting in crowd-init.properties has been made, Crowd will attempt to create the plugins-temp and atlassian-crowd.log in the Current Working Directory (CWD). This has 3 possible effects:

1) at reboot, (on opensuse at least) tomcat happens to have /var/log/tomcat6 as CWD
2) when starting manually, if you happen to be in a tomcat owned directory, the files are created there
3) If in a non-tomcat owned directory, tomcat starts, but crowd gets all errory.

Crowd should use the crowd.home setting for this, and preferably create a log directory just like Confluence.