Environment issues: Runs in VS2022 but not outside

[panch]

I have a Qt5.15.2 64Bit application that uses QtQuick to display some QML resources in QWidget application.

I simply cannot get the application to work outside the VS2022 environment.
If I use windeployqt to assemble Qt binaries and dependent sub folders into the Release folder, I can run the program in Release configuration both with or without debugging with no problem.

If I then go out into explorer and execute the program directly, it doesn't work. DebugView++ tells me this:

qrc:/statusindicator:1:1: plugin cannot be loaded for module "QtQuick": Cannot load library D:\MyProgram\Release\qml\QtQuick.2\qtquick2plugin.dll: The specified module could not be found.

Even though the file is there. If I rename the qml folder, I can verify that it also does not work through the VS IDE.

Any ideas? This is the behavior on two different PC's. I have other programs installed that use their own versions of Qt - some of them are also in the PATH env, but I guess this should not be an issue if it can find the dll's locally?

Hope to get some good pointers out there.

Thanks,
Carsten