I've actually used slackware since the late 90's but this is the first time I've installed on a box that has the uefi boot environment. I made a successful fresh install of current 64 on the box once I had my partitions and bios set up correctly (uefi enabled, no secureboot on bios; efi partition added to the normal swap and filesystem partitions). The setup program recognized the uefi environment and eventually guided me to elilo. All was fine and I could boot.

After this last major update, however, (Feb 9? Feb 10?) I ran into problems. I did my research and thought that I needed to run "eliloconfig" as root. It took me to one of the setup routines that had me do elilo again. I thought all was good. Tried to reboot and it seemed to boot fine, but my keyboard went dead and I couldn't login. Tried a couple of other boot choices and didn't have any luck.

What should I have done instead of eliloconfig after the updated kernel?

If elilo boots a generic kernel and you upgraded the kernel, then eliloconfig will copy the new generic kernel over the old one, but it will not re-generate the initrd. So you end up with a new kernel and an old initrd which lacks the modules for the new kernel.

Running eliloconfig is something I recommend only for new installations. If you want to be really safe, your boot menu should always list one kernel that is known to work. You can manually add a new kernel and matchinf initrd to elilo.conf after you have manually generated a new initrd file.
The way I generate my initrd, say for kernel 5.10.14, after installing the kernel-modules package:

which will create the file "/boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/initrd_5.10.14.gz". As you see, my initrd filename reflects the kernel it was made for.
I also manually copy the installed generic kernel from /boot into /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/
Then, I edit elilo.conf and copy the block of lines defining the existing kernel, and substitute the full name for the generic kernel (i.e. use "vmlinuz-generic-5.10.14" and not the symlink name "vmlinuz-generic" which is always the same) and the initrd (initrd_5.10.14.gz) and give them a new label.
I reboot and check if the new label boots my machine into the new kernel. If so, I make that label the new default in elilo.conf. If not, I find and correct my mistake (most often I forget to copy the new kernel into the EFI partition).

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Thank you Eric. I'm going to do some more work on this when I get back to my computer.