Old versions of Qt in the CmakeMakeFiles that do not exist - qt

Question

I am attempting to compile a software that I have built using Qt, ITK, VTK, using mingw32 on Windows 7. I have successfully done this on many computers, but I am having trouble on my laptop.
I made a mistake when I first installed Qt on this machine, in that I installed the "msvc2010" or visual studio verision of Qt. I had VS installed, and this is what it defaulted to, and I did not change it. Realizing my mistake, I uninstalled all traces of this Qt, and installed the Mingw32 version. The exact version I downloaded was: Qt libraries 4.8.3 for Windows (minGW 4.4, 317 MB)
I installed mingw32, installed qt, all nice and dandy, and now I am compiling my software. It builds beautifully, but during the linking stage I get the following nasty error:
mingw32-make[2]: *** No rule to make target 'C:/QtSDK/Desktop/Qt/4.8.1/msvc2010/
lib/QtOpenGL4.dll', needed by 'x.exe'. Stop.
CMakeFiles\Makefile2:62: recipe for target 'CMakeFiles/x.dir/all' failed
mingw32-make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/x.dir/all] Error 2
Makefile:74: recipe for target 'all' failed
mingw32-make: *** [all] Error 2
Where x is the name of my project.
Note the make target: C:/QtSDK/Desktop/Qt/4.8.1/msvc2010/lib/QtOpenGL4.dll. This is NOT the correct place to look for the DLLs. It is looking at the lib location of my first installation of Qt. The QtSDK folder does not even exist anymore, the new version is under a different folder.
This is sadly also reflected in the link.txt under CMakeFiles that is generated in the build folder by cmake. One of the entries is:
C:\QtSDK\Desktop\Qt\4.8.1\msvc2010\lib\QtGui4.dll
along with many other DLLs.
Clearly, the problem is that Cmake is generating targets for the previous version of Qt.
How can I erase whatever ridiculous cache this is originating from, so that it does not do this? I have reinstalled Cmake, I have reinstalled Qt, I have done everything I can think of. I have verified that the Cmake variable are all pointing to the correct Qt folder (the other one does not exist, so no way we could get to the linking stage if they were incorrect).
Thank you so much.
EDIT:
I get this very pertinent warning, that has the wretched file path in it:
CMake Warning (dev) at CMakeLists.txt:22 (ADD_EXECUTABLE):
Policy CMP0003 should be set before this line. Add code such as
if(COMMAND cmake_policy)
cmake_policy(SET CMP0003 NEW)
endif(COMMAND cmake_policy)
as early as possible but after the most recent call to
cmake_minimum_required or cmake_policy(VERSION). This warning appears
because target "x" links to some libraries for which the linker must
search:
comctl32, vfw32, ws2_32, wsock32, -lgdi32, opengl32
and other libraries with known full path:
C:/Qt/4.8.3/lib/libQtGui4.a
C:/ITK/lib/libitksys-4.1.dll.a
C:/VTK/bin/libQVTK.a
C:/QtSDK/Desktop/Qt/4.8.1/msvc2010/lib/QtOpenGL4.dll
CMake is adding directories in the second list to the linker search path in
case they are needed to find libraries from the first list (for backwards
compatibility with CMake 2.4). Set policy CMP0003 to OLD or NEW to enable
or disable this behavior explicitly. Run "cmake --help-policy CMP0003" for
more information.
This warning is for project developers. Use -Wno-dev to suppress it.
I added the "NEW" policy, and the warning went away, but I still have the same problem.

Answer 1

The problem turned out to be that I had installed VTK while I had the old Qt (configured for VS2010 installed). When I included VTK's libraries, it also included DLLs from Qt--but it was still pointing to the old Qt.
I reinstalled VTK, and we got past this step.

Answer 2

Try to regenerate cmake files, :
mingw32-make clean
cmake .

Answer 3

Short version: You need to delete your CMakeCache.txt file in your build directory.
Long version: Whenever CMake searches for external libraries/programes etc (eg. by FIND_LIBRARY which is called when searching for Qt, for example), it saves the result in the cache. On subsequent runs, it simply uses the cached value (if any) instead of searching for the libraries again. Therefore, you need to remove these cache entries so that CMake really searches for the libraries again. Simply delete the CMakeCache.txt and start over. If both versions are installed in parallel, make sure that QTDIR environment variable is set correctly and the path includes <QTDIR>/bin, as CMake relies on qmake to find the relevant libraries.
Note: If you don't want to delete the whole cache, deleting the Qt relevant variables should work, too.
cmake -U *QT_* .
should do the trick.
However, deleting the whole cache is the cleanest solution.