Thanks Mauricio,
That is how I expected it to work (didn't know that HumanTasks were an async execution but it makes sense now that I think about it).
To be safe I think that I should create a new thread to call startProcess() so that the thread executing this call is not potentially delayed for an unknown amount of time (it has other things to do). Some of our Workitem nodes are querying other parts of our system and could be delayed. I was a bit concerned about a build up of the number of threads but in the normal case this is not going to happen, the initial part of most workflows will execute very quickly.
thanks and thanks for all the other documentation/training you are working on. It all helps!