Preliminary investigation shows that Java's Properties load method handles a space after a backslash as a new line rather than a continuation. As might be expected, this leads to a property object that has unexpected, strangely named properties as well as list items missing from the original desired list. Also, the resulting property object may be mostly intact, depending where the extra space occurs, leading to difficult to diagnose errors.
The probably solution is probably to preprocess the service.cfg file and remove any characters after the \ and before the end of line.