OK, I don't want to say "solution". but this is what I did to make it work..
I have installed VMWare Player, downloaded the LTS 32-bit ubuntu server.
When installing Ubuntu, I installed the bare-bone server only (384MBytes after installation is done), 4 GB harddisk which will not be used 100%) AND (VERY IMPORTANT: change the network mode to "Bridged". Don't forget to connect your SoundGraph USB display to your VM (disconnectiing it from your host computer so first shut down your imon manager).
After installation, I installed lcdproc (apt-get install lcdproc) and lookup where is says "Driver=xxxx" and changed it to "Driver=imon" (BTW: I 'borrowed' the OpenELEC LCDd.conf and modified that one. This one worked exactly how I wanted). Also find the "bind=127.0.0.1" and change it to "bind=0.0.0.0".
Your brand new machine now has a LCDd on a IP address that you should be able to connect to (ifconfig to see your Virtual Machine's IP address).
Download the script.xbmc.lcd add-on (Bing and Google are your friends). It has no installer, so just copy the script to your add-on directory. You can configure it to connect to the LCDd on the Virtual Machine's IP address.
And there you go: possible to most difficult way to get it to work.......... but it works! :-)
I now have XBMCBuntu, OpenELEC and WIndows 7 on 1 SSD in my PC running the same plugin to show info in my 2-lined display with scrolling, hacked a variable in my includes.xml to display the series name on line 1 and the episode name on line 2 when browsing my Seaons/Episodes in my Videos library. Got to like it. :o)
YMMV and i wish I could write C/C++ to make a nice LCDd replacement, but no such luck.
It's late and got work to go to tomorrow so good luck!