The aeroplanes went through a major refurbishment at Auckland before being delivered to UK (I was one of the lucky people who got that job!). They were fitted at that time with the 'J2000' fit, which is the Upper Class fit recently superceded by the Upper Class Suite, along with the still-current orange and purple economy cabin, and up to date IFE. On delivery to UK in bare metal, they were immediately painted in the current VS colour scheme, and were thus some of the first Virgin aircraft to be so liveried.
After 9/11, Virgin decided it needed to reduce its fleet by around 25% to absorb the anticipated reduction in passengers, particularly to and from the USA. At that time, the B742 fleet still included a number of P&W powered aircraft which had been with us a long time, and were well past their sell-by date. Getting rid of these wouldn't have produced the capacity reduction needed, and given that the choice was B742, B744 or A340, the course of action was clear - get rid of all the B742s, including the 'new' ones, remove it from the AOC and therefore delete the engineering support it required. Unfortunately, Virgin didn't get the sums quite right, and so we needed to retain some of that capacity - hence the deal with Air Atlantic.