How to bypass the message "There is a pending reboot for this product" when trying to re-install Intel RST

Question

I have to re-install my SATA driver, but I cannot run the setup application. Upon launch, it immediately fails with an error "There is a pending reboot for this product", yet no amount of rebooting will make this message go away. Trying to uninstall Rapid Storage Technology doesn't seem to work either, as the uninstaller seems to fail before opening, and Windows claims that the uninstall failed.

Solution

After a lot of frustrating time wasted on Google, I thought about using Sysinternal's Process Monitor. It is a handy tool for spying on various things a process does under the hood, and one of these things is which registry keys it tries to access.

Using this tool, I discovered that the IRST installer was accessing the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Intel\Setup$

All I had to do to solve the problem was delete this key, and I was on my way.