Quote:
I simply dragged the scroll area onto the main window and dragged my objects onto the scroll area in the Qt designer - no code.
Well that probably created an incorrect configuration for the scroll area. If you open the .ui file as text (not a GUI view), you will see the XML that the designer writes when creating the UI. If the scroll area was done correctly, you should see a hierarchy that starts with your QMainWindow, inside that should be the QScrollArea (and the centralWidget), inside that should be a single QWidget (the one the scroll area manages), inside that should be some kind of layout, and finally inside that should be your widgets that the layout will manage.