sngetd problems

i now have sngetd running.
I start it with:

su news -c "/usr/sbin/sngetd -a 5"

I'm not sure - i couldn't find more docu on "-a" than the output of "sngetd 
--help", but i think " [a age] " does mean something like minimum time 
between 2 syncs, because when starting sngetd without that option it works 
once, and never again.

i have cronjob which echoes to the .fifo every 15 minutes to initiate a sync, 
and i have enterd a echo line into less /usr/sbin/POST to immediately send 
posts to the upstream server.

Everything seemed to work like i wanted to, but when i had a look at the 
server today, i noticed that i have tons of zombie snstore processes.
What the hell have i done wrong this time?

A series of about 50 lines like this in ps aux:
news <pid> 0.0 0.0  0  0 ?   Z   09:22   0:00 [snstore] <defunct>

Worf