¬_¬ not to fire things up after over a year, but I prefer ini because it instantly saves information and there is less chance of it being lost on a mIRC crash/dc/etc. but saying that, I use hash too sometimes, because it allows the multiple access of sections, matching the content and then retrieving the title. I'm not sure if you can do this with ini too but if you can, I don't know how. I'll give you an example.
someone buys a cookie
it gets saved in hash:
nick - cookie
but in an ini
[nick]
[bought]
cookie=1

How do you search for the cookies and list who has bought one in an ini?
(This is the only reason so far which stops me from using ini exclusively so if there is a way, I would be grateful if someone informed me.)