Been pulling my hair out trying to build my first store in VM2. Worked with VM 1.5 for years and had finally figured out a hack for all of VM 1.5's issues. NOTE TO VM2.0 DEV TEAM. Upgrades should be an improvement. Not sure who is responsible for the lovely new parent/child set up in VM2 but after hours trying to figure it out and reading through some of the other forum posts perhaps the VM team should reconsider going back to the good old 1.5 attributes.
Anyway, I finally have managed to get my product children sorted with the custom generic child variant field and I have discovered what appears to be a bug in the way VM2.0 handles menu links and the way Joomla 1.7 handles the same links. As is common with many commerce sites, I have menus that are exclusive to certain categories of products. To control the assignment of those menus I assign them to the corresponding VM pages. However much to my chagrin when I select the child page from the radio/drop-down "no additional charge" thingamajig, the new and improved redirect goes to a product detail page sans my assigned menu.
I tried creating a menu of flypages and assigning the menu to those pages, and still no dice. Since you can't use Joomla SEF urls with VM2 Pagination (yeah even more good stuff) I carefully analyzed the two urls and discovered that for some reason VM inserts both the "&" character as well as the HTML entity "&" as opposed to Joomla simply using 1 ampersand and calling it a day. Eventually, I will have to add SEF urls in sh404sef (which I cannot wait to see how that plays out). But in the meantime if anyone has any ideas as to how and resolve this issue short of rebuilding the customfields.php file, your input would be greatly appreciated.
Those are old versions. Joomla 1.7 went end of life back in February and is known to have critical security issues. J2.5.6 is the only secure version now (and possibly J1.5.26, although that is past end of life, too).
Many of the bugs have been fixed in VM2.0.2, which also is known to be insecure. So upgrading should be the first priority.