Remove the cross rails from a 2008 Sequoia's roof rack

We never use the roof rack on our Sequoia, so I wanted to remove the cross rails, as I've read they add wind noise (and may have some negligible impact on fuel economy). I Googled around for it, and found a lot of references to older Sequoias, and to Highlanders, but not much at all on the newer Sequoias. So to save others some time in the future, here's how I did it.

1. Remove the plastic covers from the ends (near the end of the car) of each side's mounting rail. These covers are only held on with plastic clips. To remove them, I protected the body with a towel, and then used a small screwdriver to release the clips on the outside. For the clips on the inside, I used a larger screwdriver, and inserted it at the flat end (bottom of the leftmost picture below) of the cover, then moved it around to the inside. The covers came off relatively easily.
2. With the cover off, you'll see two Torx bolts that secure the end rail mount system to the roof. Remove them.
3. Gently push up on the now-free rail mount box, and place a towel (or other paint-safe item) in the gap you've made. You want to give yourself as much room to work as you can without bending anything. I'd guess I got about an inch at the most, but it's important.
4. Here's where I began to hate Toyota's assembly methods. It's clear they put the completed roof rack on the car, cross rails and all, then secure it with the Torx bolts. It's clear because there are two Phillips screws on the underside of the side rails (see the rightmost picture below). These screws must come out before you can remove the end rail mount piece. More detail on this step down below.
5. With the screws out, slide the end rail mount out, then repeat this process on the other side.
6. Loosen the cross rails, and slide them out the back of the rack system.
7. Reassemble everything.

Step four is the beast in this task; overall, it'd be technically easier to remove the entire rack system from the roof so that you could then flip it over to remove the screws. But that'd be much harder practically speaking.

There is very little room to work on the screws. I had just enough room to get an L-shaped (more S-shaped, really) screwdriver in there. However, you need to be very careful when doing this, because the other end of the screwdriver will be perilously close to the paint. As you undo the screw, the head of the screwdriver will also get very close to the paint.

What I wound up doing was loosening each screw (one agonizingly slow 1/8th revolution at a time) enough so that I could get my vice grips around the head. I then turned it the rest of the way with gentle repeated turns with the vice grips. The edges of the screws got pretty roughed up, but they're countersunk and in a near-invisible location anyway, so I really didn't care.

This is slow, tedious work, and I had many near-scrapes with the screwdriver. Once the screws come out, though, it's easy from there. To reassemble, I hand-started the screws, then used the vice grips until the screws were close to the top, and finished them off with more agonizing turns from the L-shaped screwdriver. Ugh.

The whole project took me probably 90 minutes, with 80 of that going to the screws and protecting the car from damage while unscrewing said screws. The screws look pretty beat up in the photo, and the edges certainly are. But they're not visible at all in normal view (the flash lit them quite well), and the Phillips head itself is in fine shape.

Hope this helps someone else down the line...

-rob.