Is there anything that can be done to reduce the rather high initial ping
time for the 1st IPv6 interaction for two hosts ?

Typically, if I do "ping6 foo", the first packet has a delay of ~700ms or
higher, with subsequent packets around the 1ms time.  I recognise that some
amount of "auto discovery" needs to happen (ARP, etc), but 700ms worth seems
an awfully big lag.  The `equivalent' startup delay for IPv4 seems to be on
the order of 2ms or so.

Darren