I ended up overloading the system() function call with my version of it. The truth is *I* don't need system(), but other people using my framework do. So I need account for this

anyway, all I did was to make sure that the $SIG{'CHLD'} gets masked by local $SIG{'CHLD'} = <em>blah</em>, and the rest is just your typical fork()/exec()

Boy, that was annoying! Thanks to both clintp and no_slogan for your help :-)