Is it also the tails and stuff that make objects just float in place around the map and you see itemless soldiers and demomen everywhere?
That's part Valve and part our ghost plugin.
If a ghost boo's, their items will float in the air. There's also a bug that Valve introduced a long time ago where items will just randomly be floating in places.
I'm glad you know the source of the issue. This may be asking a bit much, but some donators (such as myself) don't use the tail feature at all. Maybe you could implement a way so we could completely disable the tail feature so we can see our unusual effects? I mean, maybe add an extra menu when you send !tail in the chat. The first menu will ask "Would you like to enable the tail feature?". If the user select yes, it'll lead them to the current tail attachment system. If they say no, it'll disable that particular feature of a donator and fix the unusual problem for those who don't care for attachables.
There's no easy solution for this. The plugin does some decision logic very early when a client initially connects to the server, and introducing a case where a donator wants to temporarily disable tails would require some significant refactoring of the code.