I have a need to have a running JVM start another JVM and then exit. I'm currently trying to do this via Runtime.getRuntime().exec(). The other JVM starts, but my original JVM won't exit until the "child" JVM process stops. It appears that using Runtime.getRuntime().exec() creates a parent-child relationship between the processes. Is there some way to de-couple the spawned process so that the parent can die, or some other mechanism to spawn a process without any relationship to the creating process?

Note that this seems exactly like this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2566502/using-java-to-spawn-a-process-and-keep-it-running-after-parent-quits but the accepted answer there doesn't actually work, at least not on my system (Windows 7, Java 5 and 6). It seems that maybe this is a platform-dependent behavior. I'm looking for a platform independent way to reliably invoke the other process and let my original process die.