Failure to resolve EPOCROOT on macintosh

Carbide team member here. I'm trying to get Macintosh symbian builds working with Qt. I have full MCP_NCP and NokiaQtSDK SCP Symbian(1/3)Qt(463/471) available. I have also gitorious Qt 4.7 checked out and compiled for Mac. I set an EPOCROOT environment variable to a kit. e.g.
/Users/user/PC_SDK/Symbian3Qt471 or /Users/user/mcl_ncp_wk4.6

When using 4.7.0 qmake and trying to create an example, I get:

qmake -spec symbian/linux-gcce
Error: Symbian SDK registry key not found
Error: failed to find epoc root
Either
1. Set EPOCROOT environment variable to a valid value
or 2. Ensure that the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Symbian\EPOC SDKs\CommonPath registry key is set, and then
a. Set EPOCDEVICE environment variable to a valid device
or b. Specify a default device in the devices.xml file.

When using 4.7.2 (4.7 branch from 1-26-11) I get:
/Users/user/repo/qt/bin/qmake -spec symbian/linux-gcce
Warning: failed to resolve epocroot. Set EPOCROOT environment variable to a valid value.

I opened qmake.pro in creator set up a run configuration which duplicates the error. Unfortunately, debugging does not work well because I am not able to read most variables in the debugger, but by watching the flow of stepping and passing back details to the console I was able to debug through tools/shared/symbian/epocroot.cpp which indicated that it was finding the path location and it was valid. I'm still not sure exactly where and why this error occurs but I will be doing more investigation next week.