I think some people reading awkmonk's post are missing an important factor... the secondary process is being spawned from a CGI script, which creates problems using the exec and system methods everyone has described already.

exec: "The exec function executes a system command and never returns."
system: "the parent process waits for the child process to complete."

For Win32:
The exec method would cause the script to terminate immediately, which means nothing past the exec() line in the original CGI process would be executed.
The system command would cause the script to hang and wait for the 3 hour process to complete, most likely causing a CGI timeout.

Neither of these are very viable options for awkmonk's problem because it needs to be multi-platform and on Win32 the originating CGI process would never run to completion... it would either exit at exec() or hang for 3 hours at system(), however... the sub-process would be spawned and continue running

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