It doesnt necessarily need turning on. What its telling you that is if a user put in 2" (2 inches in case you wondered) in a field instead of the " being automatically escaped, it wont be, so it means an additional function should be called to do that instead.
Everytime I try updating my configuration in Virtuemart within Joomla, it comes back that I need to login.
Evertyhing was working fine until I noticed that the magic quotes was turned off. I deleted everything within my site and reinstalled everything and I still get the same problem. I'm not sure that this is the problem but I am very highly suspicious. :dunno:
Edit:
I have been doing some research on this and want to let it be known that the magic quotes on or off doesn't matter. It is a bug in the new Joomla and Virtuemart versions. 1.0.14