Why does open scene graph only render if UseVertexBufferObject is enabled?

Question

I have written a program with OpenSceneGraph (interfaced into Qt Gui) at work and all was fine. Now that I took the program home (i.e. I got the source code home and compiled it at home), I don't see the scene anymore unless I set the option setUseVertexBufferObjects(true) which leads me to believe that the scene just doesn't render objects that aren't set up like this (i.e. the objects aren't just culled). The models are definitely a child of the viewer camera when rendering and I don't use any node masks that would lead to culling either. I reset the position of at least one object to be in the view of the camera, so it should not be a frustum culling.

My shaders use #version330, my graphics card at work is a NVidia Quadro 4000 (I believe), my graphics card at home is a Radeon HD 5870 so the hardware should not be a problem.

The OpenSceneGraph installation is a fresh one, so obviously I might have done a mistake here, but I wouldn't know which setting would lead to this "behaviour".

So, why might this happen?