Still having problems with PHP exec() function

I followed your write-up and was able to fix the fork error. Thank you very much for the help with that. Now, I am still having issues. I run my PHP page with the exec() function and it just hangs continuously. I've tried both FF and IE. I googled a bunch and found a lot of places saying you need to give full access to cmd.exe but that is a huge security vulnerability. I tried doing that to no avail. Any other ideas?
Thanks
Mike