That depends a bit on the implementation of these functions. If the option passing is implemented with OptionsPattern[] then providing lists of options should work fine. I think, before OptionsPattern[] was introduced (version 6.0), the usual way was to implement functions with optional arguments by using BlankNullSequence like f[arg1_,opt____]:=.... (Actually I don't know if this has ever been the "official" way of doing that but I have seen something like that in undocumented functions several times when I was spelunking.) So it depended a bit on the developers wether they processed the options with Flatten[List[opt]] or not. So, rather old functions that were coded before OptionsPattern[] was introduced and haven't been touched since then might get problems...
