Thank you for you replay. I am afraid I did not explain myself correctly in the OP, I apologize.
I know how GA tracks sales and how important the information can be when analyzing a site's performance. I am actually no newbie myself. I just never used the Artio Plugin, preferring to tll GA the site was e-commerce and inserting the code in the index.php file.

My question was specific about the Artio Plugin itself. GA gives you an option to inform the system if a website is also an E-commerce store. That is usually a checkbox in the GA panel.
The Artio Plugin also has a switch to allow it to generate the code to track VM sales and behavior.

What does the Artio Plugin does that is not possible to do by activating the e-commerce switch in GA?

Virtuemart operates a bit outside of the Joomla CMS. due to its origins as a stand alone program. I was wondering if the Artio plugin did anything specific for Virtuemart that wasn't possible from the GA controls.

In fact, this has become even more important since when I updated Joomla to 1.5.17 the Artio Plugin stopped working (actually, it crashed the entire site and I had to deactivate it and place the GA code back into the index.php file).

I guess I can install it on a non 1.5.17 site and check the source code with and without the VM switch activated in the plugin, but I figured I'd ask here first.

Thank you again for the replay.

I usually insert the GA code directly in the index.php file.

An SEO specialist the client hired insisted I use the Artio plugin so that "we could track virtuemart".
Since most of the world does not use VM but instead checks the box in GA to tell it that the site has an e-commerce shop, I am curious about what the Plugin does that cannot be done in the code of the site or at GA.

Can someone take 5 minutes to explain that to me in broad strokes? Thank you.

I am posting mostly for the greater good's benefit and to help the developers.

I had installed the GA plugin and module about 2 weeks ago and it worked fine.
Ysterday I upgraded Joomla to 1.5.17 from 1.5.15 and the Cart in Virtuemart (1.1.4) stopped working.

Actually, I wish it was that simple as it took me 4 hours to get to the culprit, but eventually with the help of 3 staging sites I was able to narrow down the problem to the GA Plugin.

I tested it by installing it in a version of the site prior to installing the plugin which I upgraded to Joomla 1.5.17 and I recreated the problem to a tee.

For now I placed the GA tracking code in the index.php file of the template and all seems well.