How to fix “could not find or load the Qt platform plugin windows” while using Matplotlib in PyCharm

Question

I am getting the error \"could not find or load the Qt platform plugin windows\" while using matplotlib in PyCharm.

How can I solve this?

Answer 1

I found that this was being caused by having the MiKTeX binaries in my PATH variable; and the wrong Qt dll's were being found. I just needed to re-arrange the PATH entries.

(Dependency Walker is such a useful tool.)