Over the last year we have been working on a user interface for a simple meteorological model, to be used in some courses here at the Wageningen University. One of our wishes was to create a cross-platform program but although we have succeeded in this, there are still a few open problems:

1) Sub- and superscripts, mainly on Windows (XP/7):
In the interface we are using a lot of sub- and superscripts (and special characters), both in simple QLabels as in a QTreeWidget (see image below). Initially we used Unicode symbols which worked well in our development environment (both Linux and OS X), but unfortunately a lot of unicode symbols seem to be missing on Windows (e.g. a superscript minus). For the QLabels we were able to bypass this problem by formatting the labels in html (the ugly solution?), unfortunately in the QTreeWidget this is a bit difficult. We 'solved' this by using a normal minus instead of a superscript minus, but this is off course an ugly and temporary fix.
Does anyone know a good method to work with special characters in Qt, suitable for using in QLabels, QTreeWidgets, etc on OS X, Linux and Windows?

2) Deploying programs for Windows:
To create a stand-alone package for distribution I statically compiled QtCreator as described in many online tutorials. This is working, I only have to attach a few .dll files and thats it. However it took me quite some time to statically compile QtCreator, basically trial-and-error with disabling ever more options in the compile flags until it was working. Now I have to do this again, this time on Windows 7, and so far I haven't succeeded in compiling QtCreator To me this method of using a static compilation seems unnecessarily difficult; the compilation takes half a (working) day and (at least here) it often fails.
Am I missing something? Can this be done easier? Or does everybody who wants to make even the most simple program have to go through this 'hell'? For OS X there is a nice "Mac Deployment Tool", is there something similar for Windows?

Any answers will be greatly appreciated!
Cheers, Bart vS