Forking is not an easy thing in php in a web environment we found one work around for accomplishing this on linux however this does not give us the ability to do this on Windows.
I suggest instead of trying to "fork" we create a jobs table and have a jobs script that can be scheduled to run, of course different instructions for scheduling will be needed for windows/linux but if we set a schedule something to run once a minute to check for jobs we will be able to accomplish this with little over head
Donald, do you have a particular thing you need this for? I only ask because it is from way back in March, almost 10 months old, and if we don't actually need it for something, I'd like to close it out and bring it up again later if we need to.