Virtual edit: Insert text at specific column, even on empty rows

I'm using Vim 7.1 for Windows. For some reason, I have been
conditioned to expect the following behaviour, which I no longer get.

when I press Ctrl-V at (say) text column 5 and cursor down, a 1-
character wide column is highlighted. When I press "I", I can insert
text (say, "dog") and that text will appear in text columns 5-7 on
every row that was highlighted, including rows that had no text nor
whitespace.

What I currently observe is that the inserted text does not show up on
empty lines crossed by the highlighted 1-character-wide column. Am I
just mis-remembering how this works, or is there a switch that enables
the behaviour I described above? I have virtualedit set to all.

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