Hi all. I give up (not really, but yes, kind of)

[wysota]

In this case, and it's just an example, I have two push buttons I want to make small; they just have labels "A" and "B". I resize them to the right dimensions, set horizontal and vertical policies to "fixed", then I apply a horizontal layout, and suddenly the buttons are reset to their original size.

This is because QPushButton has a minimal size hint set which means it can never be smaller than 80x25 (or something like that) when controlled by a layout. Use QToolButton instead.

I get the concept of layouts, I can lay stuff out in grids, vertical, horizontal, etc., and that they can be nested and so forth, but what I'm having such a hard time with is telling QT "there are just some things I want you to leave alone. Period."

Set the size policy to Ignore.