Comment 10 for bug 292588

I just found the same issue after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 and VirtualBox 3.x.
For some reason the package qemu-kvm got installed and that's what runs the kvm module.
Before I was using VirtualBox 2.2 (not the OSE version, but the personal use version from virtualbox.org) in Ubuntu 9.04. I don't know whether qemu was installed or not. I don't remember doing so and I'm sure I never used it, but it might be.

The Ubuntu upgrade disabled the third party repositories. I had added the VirtualBox one as, if I remember correctly, it was not available in the standard repositories before.
Then the installed VirtualBox 2.2 failed to start because it could not load some kernel module (didn't complain yet about KVM, but I don't remember the details), so I went to add the karmic repository from VirtualBox.org to Synaptic.
When going to mark the VB 3.0 package for installation, I saw that the OSE version was available, so I just removed the third party repository, updated the package list, and installed virtualbox-ose 3.0.8-dfsg-1ubuntu1.
That's when I got the error message described in the bug report.

So, I'm not sure what actually triggered the issue in my case: the change of VirtualBox version, or the upgrade to Karmic.

What I've done is deinstall qemu-kvm (and qemu with it).