Those are UV points. UVs are in the same position in 3D space as vertices. Green represents selected UVs while reddish-brown represents unselected (similarly to how with vertices, yellow = selected and violet = unselected). It seems like Maya is behaving normally, or are the UVs remaining selected after attempting to make…
Sure thing! Sometimes Maya will have some visual bugs where components will appear to be selected even though they aren't. In lieu of restarting, these instances can be fixed by switching to the respective component mode, then selecting and deselecting everything.
Well, very weird but I don't manage to reproduce the thing ... I guess it was a bug. I can do what you describe with the geen and brown colors by selecting and deselecting the uv vertices, which I couldn't do last time ... I had that problem before but it appears to be quite rare ... I just though there could be something…