One idea I thought of (whilst trying - unsuccessfully - to understand how the ;@ stuff actually works) is simply to overwrite those characters in the in-memory copy with spaces. Would that work?

/me goes back to idly thinking of adding font-lock for the ;@ tokens into ini-generic-mode...
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Toby Speight
030103016 (80GB Mk2a, blue)
030102806 (0GB Mk2a, blue)