Yeah, I've spread some of my questions around a bit....Sorry! I'll keep them here now. I'm very grateful for your help!!

I'll post that dmseg output in a few minutes. Right now I'm booted in Red Hat 9 researching this thumbdrive problem. But here's some interesting information for you:

None of the windows formatting utilities gave me a choice in partitioning. Its not like using fdisk on a harddrive. You're given a choice between fat16 and fat32, and a quick or thorough format....that's it. After formatting, windows shows no partitions.

The strange thing is....only my knoppix is seeing multiple partitions?!!! When I booted up my Red Hat 9 this morning and plugged in the thumbdrive, then browsed the hardware:

/dev/sda
/sda1 1 1016 250 fat32

It doesn't seem to see any partitions.

This is definately more complicated than it needs to be!! Are these Phantom partitions?