I was having a problem with TweetDeck in that it kept giving me an error when I tried to log out and log in as a new user. Unfortunately uninstalling and reinstalling didn’t fix the problem because it retained my user data. You’ve probably seen similar behavior in some of your AIR applications. The problem is that when you uninstall an AIR application it doesn’t get rid of the encrypted local store data. Here’s the solution.

Basically if you want to completely blow away an AIR app you need to go into the “/Users//Library/Application Support/Adobe/AIR/ELS”, find your application based on the id and then blow it away. On Windows it’s “C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Adobe\AIR\ELS” (ELS stands for Encrypted Local Store).

Hope that helps anyone who’s having preference/clean uninstall issues with AIR.