That's pretty awesome, Matt! I love it.
I don't know what's happening offhand, but I have an idea that will fix one kind of problem.
When you start arm, if you never need to type into it, you can kill all input from outside the program by making its input something else.
$ arm </dev/null
You can still use control-C to interrupt it, but no regular keypresses will flow into arm.
If it could be another problem, I'd think it's that a 'c' isn't being pressed and causing logs to be cleared, but that a log rotator is renaming and expunging logs and that looks like clearing logs and that could look like 'c'. That's a big ugly guess, though.
Hope this helps.
ps, an arg like "-e5" will show few monitor messages and make room for more Tor messages for patrons to gawk at.