I tried to wiggle around with the stick like the onscreen message says, but to no avail. I think it's the stick. I've never really used it, it may be broken.
About the double loading of textures...no, my method doesn't do this. The log messages that i got were, that a texture with the name <namehere> has been added twice to the manager preceded by a rescale message, which i got a bunch of before. So i assumed that they were loaded twice.
About the keyboard: It's possible to create good keyboard controls with the default event listeners. I don't think that LWJGL Keyboard class will work here, because it requires a Display to be created, which is only given in the context of the native OpenGL renderer.
I don't know how you do the keyboard stuff right now, but you may want to have a look at jPCT's KeyMapper-class in the util-package.