Kevin, There was some recent chatter http://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalty-site-move-18163.html about how penalties can follow a site even if the original (penalized) site is NOT 301 redirected to the new URL. Unless you are sure the hit that site got was all about bad links and not at all about on-page over-optimization, I'd make sure the content on the new dotcom domain was fresh.
