I'll be pleased to continue here in order to help others. Just let me know what I can do to help.

[Totally off topic: How do I edit the title so I can indicate the topic is actually solved? ]

Frank

Hi SGrogan, That did it - it now completes opening! In fact, until now I've been unable to use the draft workbench for resizing - I think there was an incompability with my video drivers that now seems to be fixed. The next step for you real developers is to figure out the 1-line fix :D that will ta...

Hi sgrogan,

T;hanks for the suggestion. I just tried that. The splash screen came up, and then nothing happened. Task manager shows the app is not running.

Perhaps 1 step forward, 1 step to one side?

Frank

Hi, That file already exists. The contents are: [Paths] Documentation=../../Docs/Qt-5.15.1 Examples=../../Examples/Qt-5.15.1 Prefix=.. There are no QT dlls in the C:\Windows\System32 directory. The \bin directory in the output build directory contains a large number of Qt dlls, including Qt5Core.dll...

Hi, "The fact that the wrong Qt dlls are loaded if you don't copy them into FreeCAD's bin" - I took earlier advice and copied the entire contents of the LibPack bin directory into the FreeCAD output directory. I had hoped to avoid this type of conflict. "The issue with the missing plugin is caused b...

Hi,

I'm afraid not. It built fine. Won't launch because I get the following error: It's getting pretty discouraging; I was a professional programmer for 50 years and never had this much trouble with a project that was not just starting...

Thanks for asking,
Frank

WMayer,

I did use F5 to start debugging. It gave the errors I showed in the VSOutput then stopped with an 'access denied' error.

Frank

SRogan, Unfortunately there are NO freecad copy options in CMake: 15Apr21_CMakeFreeCADOptions.png So I'm not sure how I would do that. Putting 'copy' into the search box shows nothing at all. Thanks for the idea - the instructions on the site explicitly call to set all 3 copy options on, but they no...

Here's the output window from VS2019: Build started... 1>------ Build started: Project: fc_version, Configuration: Release x64 ------ 1>Generating version_check 1>git 1>E:/Dev/FreeCAD19_Output/src/Build/Version.h.out written 1>Generating Version.h 1>C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\201...

I followed your instructions, I believe. The configuration in VS looks like this: But at least I'm getting new errors (sigh): I'm getting tired.
Frank