I have many VMs on my Windows 8.1 64-bit host. I have both Windows 8.1 32-bit and Windows 8.1 64-bit as guests. I noticed that SMEP is enabled on my 32-bit guest, but not my 64-bit one.
SMEP is not enabled.
So I tried something: I checked the box under VM settings -> Hardware -> Processors -> Disable acceleration for binary translation.