I have to call several (> 10) .exe command line programs in the background.
Creating a Windows Services doesn’t sound very appealling in this context – c’mon, that’s a bit overpowered for such a simple task.
Is there anything like a daemon(3) subroutine for Windows?
You might look into using the srvany.exe service wrapper found in the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools. I have used this method quite successfully under Windows XP, but I cannot comment on how it may work for newer versions of the OS.
There seems to be plenty of information available1 on how to use this tool.
1 – Google search for srvany+howto