I don't think it does... I haven't blocked anything from Virtuosa with my firewall and my gold version still works and converts properly.

I think the main solution to any Virtuosa problems is having the exact version that works, which is the one that was on download.com. I have given out this .exe to a friend and he went gold and his works fine. He is on SP2 and I am not if that makes any difference... but in any case I think if everyone had the correct installer it would work fine.