Does the bare LWJGL distribution use hardware rendering or software rendering?
LWJGL always uses hardware rendering. Since it is a games library, it just quits if no hardware rendering is available.
From the LWJGL wiki: "Made the library throw an exception when hardware acceleration is not available on Windows. No point in running at 5fps is there? "(LWJGL wiki)
There is a command-line switch org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.allowSoftwareOpenGL but I don't think you can force it to use software rendering.