Tony,
Got it working in my VM using your batch file method. See attached screenshot. It's slower than molasses firing up in the VM using the batch file but it works.
Have faith, shared non-believers :D (I just need to fix up the platform stuff to work right and slim the DLL's back down)
My reason for needing shared isn't necessarily for Qt, but one of our contributers is working on experimental Delphi/FreePascal bindings to libembroidery and he has to use a DLL. There's something mind-boggling about the definition of static when talking about Pascal versus C that makes no sense to me. I actually recommend that he static links to libembroidery due to our API still heavily changing but static has a whole different meaning in Pascal. I'm not sure on the MXE policy on adding packages to MXE but someday when the API is frozen, I think I would like to have a package for MXE.
You've been a great help Tony.