I do appreciate that you were trying to help... Unfortunately, the above would not work. Just for the notes - quote from the Camel Book (3rd edition, p. 811) - "The system function works exactly like exec, except that system does a fork first and then, after the exec, waits for the executed program to complete." That's exactly what prevents me from envoking an external program using exec or system - I need my CGI program to completely finish and exit BEFORE the child process finishes.

There's a similar post "Understanding fork" by neiwatson. I'll try some of the suggestions offered there, even though I'm not sure to what extent they are applicable to Windows systems. I was just wondering if anyone had experience forking on Windows systems from a CGI program (it's important for it to be a CGI program, i.e. run on a web server)