I was running a sample code from the java lightweight game library documentation/tutorials:
http://www.lwjgl.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_Quad_colored
I ran this on my machine at home and for some reason the data in the vertices and colors arrays are swapped. That makes the quad display using the color data as vertices and vice versa. I ran it on a machine at work which is a NVidia Quadro FX 580 and it works as the author of the tutorial intended.
Is this likely to be a driver error or some other issue? I am very much a beginner at GL (and 3D graphics in general) but looking at the way the buffers are bound and used, I do not detect any ambiguity in the code. I will try to test on another AMD 64 bit card later today.