Thanks for your advice. I did not say so, but I'm primarily relying on the default environment and not so much the command line. I see now how to make this work by providing the necessary amount of backslash'es. Maybe it was your statement:
THis syntax has never been correct. If it ever worked, than only by chance (read: because of incorrect/imperfect code).
that set me off wrong, because in 2009.03 (before the introduction of hashtable) it did work and there were no confusing parsing of escapes. Still the parsing I see now is not exactly user friendly, example (U-Boot 2012.07):
=> setenv foo echo part one\;echo part two => print foo foo=echo part one\;echo part two => run foo part one;echo part two => printenv foo foo=echo part one\;echo part two => printenv <snip> foo=echo part one\\;echo part two <snip>
here the run and print commands yields the expected result based on the setenv but not "printenv" alone, and my results does not match your example which were
=> setenv foo echo part one\\\;echo part two ; print foo ; run foo foo=echo part one\;echo part two part one;echo part two
Best Regards, Mats