I have the 434 MHz version of these working in a remote control with Virtual wire, have not seen what you are seeing.
You have them running on separate Arduino's, yes? I have not seen anyone successfully use Tx and Rx on the same Arduino.
With 2 Arduino's, try connecting the Tx out to the Rx in, see if you can even get data going that way. If not, then VirtualWire is not running.
My remote was built under -0021, I have not tried VirtualWire under 1.0 or 1.0.1.
The receiver code is smart - if properly encoded data does not come across, it will not be passed along as output data.