Hi blaub4r,
Yeah, that caught me too. Zorro stores prices in files by year. For years older than the current year, if the file exists Zorro assumes that it's good and moves on. For the current year, Zorro will add new prices to an existing file, but it's unclear to me under exactly what conditions. Sometimes it did it for me, sometimes it didn't. It would make sense to me for it to add if the file modified date is older than EndDate or current time - BarPeriod, but I haven't spent the time to test that.
And, of course, Zorro only connects to the Broker when it needs to.

HTH.