Just did a complete reinstall of the Standard evaluation version under www.testdomain.com/viart and this is the scenario right out of the box. Here goes.
Went straight to the admin panel and the global settings. Added the SSL information of
https://testdom.securedomain.com. Checked store and neither worked.
In admin added the selection for "on user profile page" and saw that the "Open account and check out (Customer)" does work but with wrong path as it was missing the /viart directory.
Changed the secure URL to include the /viart/ and the "Open account and check out (Customer)" begins to work properly.
However, under no circumstances does the "Check out without creating account" send the user into SSL mode.
Followed the "Check out without creating account" link and entered details as if I were a customer. Got all the way past the entry of credit card information without going into secure mode defeating the purpose of SSL.
I would guess that if anyone is not experiencing this that it is because they upgraded from a previous version. However, right out of the box this problem is very clear.
I hope that the folks at ViArt can look into this soon. I have contacted support.
Wil