Make sure you complied Qt with the 'debug' flag. This might be obvious for a lot of you out there. But for a Qt newbie like myself, this took some thinking.

Problem: you can compile a release version of your Qt project just fine. However, when you try and compile it with debug information so you can walk through your program it fails.

Solution: recompile Qt with the 'debug' flag.

Hope that helps someone like it did me,
Paul