watchdog command doesnt like l(text,url)

I get very, very strange results on my admin logs when trackbacks are unpublished or marked as spam. They look *mostly* okay when they're deleted, but the log entry is still subtly wrong (truncated). The problem appears to be related to the use of l(text,url) commands inside watchdog t() blocks. Any time the l() is used, the watchdog entries come out dead wrong, going so far sometimes as to put information in the wrong column, and always truncating text incorrectly.