QGIS » QGIS Application

This issue applies to both Windows 32 and 64 bit and I have tried it on Windows 7, Vista and XP. I have also had the same error with QGIS 1.7x, 1.8 and 1.9.9.

Due to the dependency of another piece of software I MUST have GDAL installed for Python 3.2 independent of QGIS. However, QGIS appears to have its own instalation of GDAL and version 1.9 will even let you specify where the repositories are. However, QGIS does not look for its own GDAL install but tries to use the one referenced by the Windows environment variable regardless of whether I specify an appropriate path (in QGIS 1.9) and despite the fact that I can see the gdal18.dll in the QGIS \\bin folder.

On startup, in QGIS 1.7x I get the error that the module is not compatible with Python 2.5 and in QGIS 1.8 I get the error meesage "Unable to load GdalTolls plugin. The required osgeo [python-gdal] module is missing. Install it and try again."

If I uninstall QGIS and GDAL for Python32, then reinstall just QGIS, the issue goes away until I try to install GDAL for Python32.

I have been told that it ought to be possible to have an independent GDAL instalation alongside QGIS because QGIS uses its own instalation of Python and GDAL, but this does not seem to work. Please can we have an option to tell QGIS which dlls to use for GDAL or, even better, can we have a version of QGIS for Python 3.2?