After vacation too I tried a week or two in my spare time trying to set the environment ,,,, all in vain . I re installed everything step by step but still was not able to get things running. Even tried with Qt Creator a lot..but still in vain.

Finally I landed on this post and indeed following it solved my problem too !!!

Resolution :
1) Invoke Qt S60 command prompt/
2) set QMAKESPEC to symbian-abld
3) set QTDIR to the proper symbian Qt directory. ( I have the 4.6.0-beta1 for symbian)
4) invoked carbide from the command prompt.

Then I made sample hello world app as per the steps before... and it ran !!
Hello symbian :-)

Now trying to make .sis file.. some prob with certificate... but will find a way for that too