launching freeradius from another program

Maybe the wrong forum for this. Has anyone ever gotten freeradius to launch from another executable successfully? I have a cgi written in C that starts and stops radius (as well as populates tables, etc.). I can get it to work but no matter what I do I can't seem to keep it from generating a zombie process for the cgi (when starting; stopping is OK) The cgi does a fork and exec of a process and that child process does in turn a fork and exec of a radius launch script. Overly complicated but that's the nature of our system (cgi handles general form processing, first child does various tasks for freeradius; one of which is starting and stopping the server). If I substitute another process I don't get the zombie. Bill