I doubt it's actual USB thumb drives, but more the formatting.
OS 9 and up to around OS X 10.5 has an internal file system Apple calls Apple Double.
You have a resource fork and you have a data fork. The resource fork stores the info about a file so that when you double-click on it, it opens in the correct app. The data fork stores the actual data.
You don't see this stuff in the background because Apple hides it from you. If you turn on invisibles though you can see all the little correcsponding files that equate to the resource fork.
PC on the other hand has ONE fork. It's the data fork and that's it. PC's rely on three letter filename extensions to know which app to open your file in.
Most USB thumb drives, especially if you do not reformat them, come stock with FAT-32 formatting. FAT-32 does NOT support Apple Double. So assuming this is the case with your USB drive, when you copied this file it lost the association with the resource fork.
Hence when unpacking it - you got PC icons.
Burning the file via CD kept the resource forks.
Apple Double was the way Apple gave Mac users an advantage in that they did not have to add an extension to their filenames. But it also made it difficult for these old Mac users to transition to later version of OS X as Apple began to phase out resource forks.
PC users on the other hand would get pissed off when browsing server shares because Apple Double meant that all these small little files littered the share everywhere. Mac users couldn't see them but PC users could.
Sorry. Long winded explanation for why what you did worked.