Windows NT Server, FORK, SOCKETS, and seperate processes

I've got effectivly a glorified chat server which upon the arrival of a message thorugh a socket connection goes off and runs a bunch of database processed. My questions is this: How can I seperate the database processing into a seperate processor process? I really don't want the chat server to have to wait until after the database processing is done to go intercept and process another request--this just doesn't seem right. I want the chat server process to be able to deal with getting and receiving messages, and another process to deal with the database processing. That way if one of the processes get's slow, the other isn't affected. Something like the fork command would work really well, but fork doesn't exist in NT. Anyone have any ideas? I'm running Windows NT4.0 sp6a Apache Server 1.3.xx MySQL and of course, PHP 4.2.1