522. Briefly: nvidia installer holding up dpkg

I'm normally using smxi to handle my graphics drivers on debian.

Because I'm working on a QM/MM problem at the moment I wanted to use gromacs (4.6) to generate a solvated molecule, but I kept getting errors about missing libcudart4.so. So I figured I'd install it using apt-get install libcudart4

Everything went fine until I got the following prompt:

Selecting 'No' stops everything, and selecting Yes hangs it.

You can't install or remove any other programs until this has been resolved, as everything ends with

E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.

Running

sudo dpkg --configure -a

takes you back to the screenshot above.

The fix:
Run

nvidia-installer --uninstall

At this point you get

You can now select No and go through everything:

After this, you can run

sudo dpkg --configure -a

and now your system is working again so that packages can be installed and removed.