I've been googling for a solution to this issue and although I've found many people sharing my problem none of their solutions work for me.

I wrote a C++ application using Qt framework using Visual Studio 2010. I built and ran the application in "Release" mode from Visual Studio without issue, but when I copy that exe from the Release folder to a new destination (pretend its a new PC) it fails to run providing this error:

```
---------------------------
TestApplication
---------------------------
This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "windows".

Available platform plugins are: windows.

Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

```

Within the executable directory I have the following file structure:  

./TestApplication.exe  

./libGLESv2.dll  

./Qt5Core.dll  

./Qt5Gui.dll  

./QtWidgets.dll  

./platforms/qwindows.dll  

./qt.conf 

All dll files were taken from the 5.0.0 build of Qt in the Qtbase folder where the libraries reside.

The qt.conf file is:

```
[Paths]
Plugins=.

```

Without it, the launch error is the same except it says "minimal" and "offscreen" are available platforms as well.

For all other people experiencing this error it seemed to be solved by creating the `platforms` folder and putting in the qwindows.dll. But doing that myself doesn't change any behavior.

Is there something I've done wrong? Perhaps my method of generating the .exe in the first place is wrong?