How to create finished executable?

[Pyrrha]

I know this is a noob question and that it's been asked before, but I am still stuck and I've been trying to get this to work for the past 6 days, so I'm resorting to asking here.

I'm relatively new to programming. I only know a little C++ and just started trying to learn Qt last week. I have a program (a stat point calculator for a game I play) that I wrote as a console application in C++ using Dev C++. That worked flawlessly. Then I installed QtSDK v1.1.2 with Qt Creator 2.2.1 and Qt libraries version 4.7.3, and I attempted to recreate it in a GUI form. This was also a success. When building and running it in Qt Creator, it looks and behaves as it should.

What I can't figure out is how to make an executable or package that I can distribute to others (fellow players who would like to use it). I understand the basic idea that Qt defaults to dynamic linking, and I guess this creates a software package that can be installed? I'm not sure, because I haven't figured out how to do this.

Ideally, I'd prefer a standalone executable for this program, which I'm also aware requires static linking. For the past 6 days I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling various version of Qt, mingw, Qt Creator, as well as the whole Qt SDK bundle, every combination of configure -static -release, mingw32-make, and other commands I got from tutorials, but nothing has worked. Everything I tried either isn't possible (because the tutorial was outdated and didn't apply to any versions I could get my hands on) or resulted in errors I couldn't figure out how to resolve.

Apparently I'm not the only one with this problem.
http://www.qtcentre.org/threads/4337...n-qt-sdk-1.1.2

Is there a step-by-step, TOTALLY NOOB-FRIENDLY guide anywhere on how to deploy applications built in the Qt Creator, statically or dynamically? I mean hold-my-hand walk-through style. Please don't link me to the top 20 Google results for this, because I've already tried literally EVERY SINGLE LINK I got from Google searches on this topic, and none of the instructions on them worked or I couldn't figure out how to follow them. When people say things like "make sure your path is properly set," I have no idea what that means or how to do it. It took me all of 2 hours to write the whole program and learn enough Qt to bring it to GUI form, but 6 days and I still can't make a distributable executable. Help!