I see - I figured you had a good reason.
So I notice that there's a hook at the end of fetch_musername so you don't have to edit that file if you don't want to, you could probably just use hook location fetch_musername with something like
Code:
$username = str_replace(' ', ' ', $username);
$user['musername'] = $vbulletin->usergroupcache["$displaygroupid"]['opentag'] . $username . $vbulletin->usergroupcache["$displaygroupid"]['closetag'];