Forking your PHP daemon will cause it to zombie on exit.
...or so I've seen on:
FreeBSD (PHP4.2.x)
Debian (PHP4.3.0-dev)
Darwin (PHP4.3.0-dev)
This was tested with the example code above and other scripts created for evaluation.
Seems adding --enable-sigchild to your configure will get rid of the problem.
Hope that saves some hair tearing :]