I’m shouting “help” here, so if anybody knows the answer to my hair-pulling problem, please save me. How I land myself in this situation may or may not be important, so unless inquired, let’s skip it for now.
The methods to uninstall AIR/Apollo as described in the AIR release notes doesn’t work for me, why? Because in my Add or Remove Programs control panel, there is neither "Adobe Apollo 1.0 Alpha1", nor "Adobe AIR 1.0 Beta 1" nor "Adobe AIR"!
Now, just how do you uninstall Adobe AIR when there is no such available option? 
http://blog.underplot.com/software/how-to-uninstall-adobe-air/
Thanks Shurik, though I got the solution posted here already.