Quote Originally Posted by anda_skoa View Post
Since you can run new test applications the build itself seems to be OK.

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It's now beginning to make sense. I downloaded qt-opensource-windows-x86-5.11.2.exe to see if it too produced the same outcome and wow, this installer actually includes MSVC 2015 32 bit, MSVC 2015 64 bit, MSVC 2017 64 bit, and a host of other platform installs, (not sure why it is called qt-opensource-windows-x86-5.11.2.exe). Further, there are a host of other optional 'modules' including Qt WebEngine with the note "On Windows, the module is only available under MSVC 2017 64 bit".

So it seems that the problem I have been fighting is related to attempting to build a 32 bit version of Qt WebEngine...a very long story...(I already bought MSVC 2017 because I read that it was necessary to build Qt WebEngine).
And this also means that I am either stuck at Qt 5.8 or convert all of my applications that depend on webenginewidgets to some other widgets(?) or move to 64 bit with radically reduced hardware support.

Or perhaps, I could try (again) to use Qt 5.8 Qt WebEngine with Qt 5.11 or Qt 5.12 MSVC 2015 32 bit as outlined in https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebengine-platform-notes.html under "Using Earlier Qt Versions to Build Qt WebEngine" (which failed completely when I tried it).

It seems that the direction (future) of Qt is 64 bit and it is time to just accept this.
Of course, I could then argue that the Linux platform would be more of a possible option!