Hello anyone from the future. harishalipaka has the correct answer about what to do in this situation (above). Was experiencing a similar issue where my Splunk Universal Forwarder wouldn't start through services.msc and wouldn't generate logs (in Windows Event Viewer or splunkd.log).
By navigating to /bin and restarting manually, Splunk generated logs in /var/log/splunk and I was able to see what the problem was.
Thanks, harishalipaka!
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