Problem with putting a process in the 'background'

[Silvio Picano]

How do I make a process run in the 'background' on a 
3b1?  

I have written a daemon to be run ('similar' to lpsched)
that I want placed in the background upon shutdown/reboot.

I thought that if I placed the executable in /etc/daemons, 
the rc file would start it for me (at least the comments 
and code in rc say so).  Wrong: upon reboot, everything 
in /etc/daemons was 'zapped' away??

Ok, so I placed my executable in /etc and called it from
rc directly.  Wrong: the reboot procedure failed (it never
returned: a blank screen resulted with "Working" in the corner 
'forever') and I needed to reload ALL the software (argh).

System: I have V3.0 with Dev. Software

I assume my daemon (simple C Code compiled with cc only)
does not need to 'anything extra' as far as being a 
background process??  My process works fine when I simply
run it directly.

What is the 'correct' way to do this?

Thanks in Advance
Silvio