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...my understanding of ZPE is that it is part of the EM spectrum (beyond gamma rays), rather than something that mediates the EM spectrum as was the concept of an 'ether' - though perhaps 'ZP energy' is distinct from 'ZP field' as you referred to. ???

I gather this is the classical understanding, dougd. Yet I have encountered many articles recently that speak of a zero-point vacuum field as being a mediating field of zero-point energy, spontaneous emissions of virtual particles (photons). The conjecture is such a field more basic or fundamental than the EM field may "reside" in an additional fifth "time-like" dimension. I don't know whether or not this is true. But I find the speculation interesting.

A particularly interesting example that doesn't deal specifically with photons, but with particles generally, is one offered by P. S. Wesson in his article “Five Dimensional Relativity and Two Times” — in which it is posited that time-like paths of massive particles in four dimensions can arise from null paths in a fifth dimension, where there is an oscillation around the hypersurface we call space/time. His article also suggests that a particle in the fifth dimension could be multiply imaged in the four dimensions, and that the weak equivalence principle in the four dimensions may be the symmetry of a corresponding five-dimensional metric.

Or to put it another way, instead of there being 10⁸⁰ particles in the visible four dimensions, it could actually be the case that as little as a single particle in a fifth dimension is imaged 10⁸⁰ times in the four dimensions of our normal experience. [P. S. Wesson, "Five Dimensional Relativity and two Times," Cornell University Library, May 2002. (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0205/0205117.pdf), which A-G and I quote in our book, Timothy.]

Anyhoot, Wesson's model seems to answer for non-local particle behavior and superluminal velocities.