I'm guessing that, for some reason, things didn't get installed
fully/properly (probably related to the "air vs my machine" thing),
and the restarts have somehow managed to get it to register into
synaptic properly (registers as "adobeair" (all one string ... or, at
least, it does here) ... and it's not like "air" is something that's
easy to misspell, so I can't have missed it that way ... to be honest,
the reboots with the final uninstall were done simply because I'd had
to do them the first time round, not from not finding the software in
Synaptic ... I worked from "experience", and rebooted to save myself
any further stress ...first time round, though, I definitely *did*
have to restart a couple of times before it showed ... bizarre ...
however, first time round, I *did* install air from a magazine
coverdisk ...