That seems really unlikely. All parts of Qt that are Windows platform-dependent go through an abstraction layer that eventually ends up making a Windows system call.

My hunch is it has nothing to do with the compiler at all and has more to do with the permissions set in the environment in which you are trying to run the program. That specific program might require elevated permissions in order to run; the standard uninformative Windows error in that case is the one you see, basically, if you don't have permission to run the program, pretend it doesn't exist. If your testing has included running it from a command line where you have admin permissions, then it will work. If you start Visual Studio with elevated permissions, it will work. If you run plain old Qt Creator with no special permission, it will fail.