Why, what am I doing wrong? I've disabled "generate debug info" in linker settings and changed:
The libraries you link to are set per-configuration; this lets you (for example) link to debug versions of third-party libraries in your debug builds, and release versions of those libraries in release versions. It sounds like, as Mark states, you are missing some libraries in your release config that you have specified in your debug config.
Without more details about what symbols are not being found by the linker (i.e., without the full error texts) we can't really speculate much further, but Mark's suggestion of comparing the linker setting pages between the two configurations should lead you to your missing libraries.