title: How to run a Qt Program without Qt itself being installed?
body: <p>I have written a program with Qt5.3.1 and run it on my development machine where it works fine.  I copied all necessary .dll files into the folder where my .exe is.  These are:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Qt5Widgets.dll</li>
  <li>Qt5Network.dll</li>
  <li>Qt5Gui.dll</li>
  <li>Qt5Core.dll</li>
  <li>icudt51.dll</li>
  <li>icuin51.dll</li>
  <li>icuuc51.dll</li>
  <li>libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll</li>
  <li>libwinpthread-1.dll</li>
  <li>libstdc++-6.dll</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Now I want to run that program on a machine that has no Qt installed.  How do I do that?  It shouldn't be necessary for users to install an IDE just to use a program, right?</p>
  
  <p>Details of the development machine where it works:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Windows 8</li>
  <li>Qt 5.3.1</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>The deploying platform is:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Windows Vista</li>
  <li>No Qt installed but all necessary .dlls are in place</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Errors I get are first:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "windows".
    Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Next error message is:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>This application requested the Runtime to terminate in an unusual way. Please contact support.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Then the program crashes.  <strong>But</strong> if I install Qt5.3.1 it works.  So it has something to do with files in the <code>c:/Qt</code> directory</p>