I'm utterly bemused, but it seems that someone called simonpj disabled
the virtual timer in rev 1.25:

	+ #if 0 /* tmp--SDM */
      		initialize_virtual_timer(TICK_MILLISECS);
	+ #endif

and tried to blame it on me by putting my name in the comment :-)

(Simon - perhaps you copied this file out of my working tree and
committed it by mistake or something?)