Hey Chip,  I've had to control the LED color and LED on/off before, and I was able to do it without presets.  I had to use the "brightness" command and set it either to 0 or 2?  (full off or full on) to make the led go off.  Not sure if this is similar to what you were doing, but using the brightness wasn't exactly my first instinct to use.

My use case, was that the client wanted to have the mic to track the VoIP phone.  If the phone was not in use, the LED would be OFF.  If the VoIP was off-hook, the LED would track Red/Green with privacy mute.  The awesome part is that you can change the colors still while the brightness is OFF.  So you can have simple code track red/green, and another peice of simple code track hook on/off and change the brightness to off/full and it works great.

No Presets required.

-jason