The buttons are used as normal buttons, they communicated everything through SLOTs activated by "clicked()" signals. The initial placement in designer had the text pushing the icons I needed to use out of the way; being restricted to using designer (and still learning the library) I just placed labels *over* them.

Realizing those absorbed clicks no matter which options or combination of options I selected I subclassed and passed clicks through so the buttons would work *despite* the labels. The labels are *just* text labels that I wish to do nothing with other than display text. They're overlayed over the button in order to display the button's text, but *over* the image.