For anyone else who bumped into this problem I have to say this - it is much easier to use one of the packages containing QT pre-built binaries for Visual C++ than trying to build it yourself. And the Qt driver (the 4.3 version at least) is awfully hard to get to work, especially when deploying your application (on some machines it works like a charm but on others it can't find the driver, using the same code and binaries) and is not worth the trouble, you are much better off using a dedicated MySql library.