All forked up

I need some Unix guidance.

Foolishly or not, I designed the new PostgreSQL logging subsystem
to run as a process. It's forked off a function called by the
Postmaster main program right before the if(...)pmdaemonize
statements -- meaning that the shared memory enviroment has been
established, but the signals have not yet been attached.

When I issue the fork() call, it successfully creates a child process,
but the child is DOA. Investigation reveals a signal 5 trace/breakpoint
trap at the fork.

How do I prevent this? I presume you can mask it, but is that really
what I want to do?
  TIA,
    Tim Holloway