Some more info, continuing from the situation I left in #11:

I tried again to make Qt Creator recognize the second Qt version/installation. No luck there, same result as the one in post's #1 screenshot.

Next, I started Qt Creator from the modified Command Prompt mentioned in my previous post and opened the Options|Qt Versions dialog. The new installation was recognized, but only because it was in the PATH variable, not because I manually added it there. Furthermore, building some of my own projects from scratch proved to be successful and the resulting executables are completely autonomous with no additional Qt dependencies. When switching the Qt version used from the Project's properties to the original, shared-linkage version of Qt, building also completes successfully and the executables run perfectly from inside Qt Creator's environment (but not from a Windows Explorer window, as is expected).

At this point, it seems that my original objective should be considered completed, since I could start Qt Creator from a customized batch file that also sets up the environment for it to properly locate the static Qt installation. But, what if someone would like to use more than two Qt installations? I don't think that multiple batch file configurations is what the Trolls had in mind when designing the Qt Versions feature of Qt Creator!

So, the next step in my experiments was to determine if there's a the possibility that Qt Creator failed to locate the static Qt installation when adding a manual entry for it, because Qt Creator is searching there for some files which are either missing or have different relative paths or different contents than what is expected. Remember the qt-win-opensource-4.6.1-mingw.exe" I mentioned in #5? I reinstalled from it, in the default target directory (C:\Qt\4.6.1). Then started Qt Creator from its normal shortcut inside the Qt SDK's Program Group. And guess what? In the Qt Version dialog, this third installation of Qt is properly recognized when trying to add a manual entry for it!

qtcreator02.png

Any thoughts on where to go from here to get to the bottom of this? Thanks!