Most of the rest of the world is not up to IPv6. I am wondering if one
can disable use of IPv6 without recompiling the kernel. I have looked
on news grous and did not see anything. I was hoping that 3.5 might be
new enough that it would have this.

The reason that I want to disable IPv6 is that some programs take
several mintues to complete an operation when using IPv6. The main
problem appears to be that DNS IPv6 packets are not answered and it
takes a long time for the retry and so forth. For example, to do a
'whois yahoo.com', it would take about two minutes. Also, I was going
to setup apache 2.0.49 as a proxy; however, it takes a couple of minutes
to get a single page due to this problem.

Also, if I know that IPv6 DNS will not get answered, it would seem
inneficient to even have the OS try IPv6 first. Why not skip to IPv4?

As a separate note, doing nslookup on host being looked up by whois
completes in less than a second. I suspect that whois and apache httpd
might make a different call to for host name resolution than most programs.