Comment 6 for bug 664275

@Clement Lefebvre - Thank you for taking time out from your incredibly productive activities to explain.

However, as you will see from other entries, I had simply failed to appreciate that GParted's default settings had been changed from the 'no problems' settings used in the superb LinuxMint-9.
Thanks to Curtis Gedak's intervention, I downloaded his latest GParted Manual, found the not too obvious 'Specifying Partition Alignment' entry and spent ten hours checking it all out on two different rigs with two different makes of USB stick, and also checked out Patrick Verner's PartedMagic 5.6 whose GParted suffered from the same new default setting, that case not being helped by the absence of a 'Help, Contents' hypertext Manual as has been included with LinuxMint-10 RC.

In wonderful hindsight it might have been better to make the new GParted's default setting 'Cylinder' rather than 'MiB', with an on-screen note that said 'use MiB setting for SSD drives', but it's not a perfect world. I am just glad to have got to the bottom of this little mystery and be able to pass on some practical advice !