Linux flash drives

I have only seen the ability to change light patterns once on a funky USB stick years ago - It had a number of LEDs and you could do a variety of things, I got it free at a trade show, but it was rubbish... the driver kept crashing, made BSOD and more!

On bog standard USB sticks, the LED is directly controlled by the USB drive and not the machine. The only way to stop it will be to open it up and physically remove the LED... or if possible, you may just want to put a bit of tape over it.

AFAIK, GParted doesn't support ISO-9660. Certainly it's not listed in the View->File System Support dialog box. This isn't surprising, really, since ISO-9660 is intended for use on optical discs, not on hard disk partitions. I don't consider this a bug in GParted.

As to Windows' inability to access the partition, that's probably a matter of Microsoft's programmers deciding it was too odd a thing to do. It's conceivable that there's a third-party driver that will enable Windows to mount such a partition, but I haven't searched for such a thing. Even if you find it, though, Windows is still limited to using one partition per USB flash drive, so in your scenario you'll be able to access just one partition from Windows.

The real question is: What are you trying to accomplish? That is, what is your ultimate goal in setting up a USB flash drive in this way? There may be some other way to do it.