problems creating toolbar...(do see the attachment)!

[mchara]

Hi, why not
QAction * QToolBar::addWidget ( QWidget * widget ) I had used it to embed QComboBox in toolbar and it worked fine.
This method is meant exactly for such cases!

Adds the given widget to the toolbar as the toolbar's last item.
If you add a QToolButton with this method, the tools bar's Qt::ToolButtonStyle will not be respected.

This one is important:

Note: You should use QAction::setVisible() to change the visibility of the widget. Using QWidget::setVisible(), QWidget::show() and QWidget::hide() does not work.

So, insert your combobox directly without any layouts and additional widgets.
and try with combobox created withoud any parant,
addWidget () should deal with everything(reparenting, layout etc.) by itself, so simply do not disturb it.

theQuickFinder  = new ElQuickFinder();
  theFindToolBar->addWidget(theQuickFinder);

theQuickFinder  = new ElQuickFinder();
  theFindToolBar->addWidget(theQuickFinder);

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works fine in my app.

You can read also about related
QWidget * QToolBar::widgetForAction ( QAction * action ) constmethod.