I have a legit copy as well, so this phoning home thing isn't just symptomatic of arr'd copies.  As Pescado just said, phoning home is bad so you might consider turning off your internet connection while playing the game or getting something like Little Snitch to protect yourself during general internet tomfoolery.

I just implemented this and it works like a charm; thank you for tracking this down!  Something worth mentioning, though, is that the game still tries to phone home so turning off your internet connection or having a program like Little Snitch is still appropriate.  Perhaps this was obvious to others, but I did not expect the game to phone home after bypassing the launcher, hence I thought I would mention it here.

I popped over here from the Roo-tard thread to check out your house, and it is indeed quite nice and a vast improvement in contrast to the sexist bastard's work.  I just downloaded the house from Megaupload and did not encounter a problem.