MacOS – Installing Adobe AIR on Mac OS X

I've been trying to install Adobe Air in Mac OS X 10.6.2 for a while without success.

When installing Adobe AIR the progress bar reaches completion and disappears. Then nothing happens, the installer window stays there. I can close it and it closes, I can quit the Adobe AIR Installer and it quits cleanly, but then it doesn't work.

When I try to install an Adobe AIR application I see the Adobe AIR Application Installer appear on the dock but nothing else happens. The application is never installed or launched.

The Adobe AIR Uninstaller suffers a similar fate. It appears on the dock and nothing happens. The only way to get it uninstalled is to remove the files by hand.

If I try to re-install, the installer suffers the same fate: icon in dock, nothing else happens. Only when manually removing the files I can get it to show a dialog box that again stalls and does nothing.

Also, after installing Adobe Air I see it created some files in /Users/Shared (Shared is not my username). Is that common or is it a symptom of some problem?

Any ideas what's going on? Any ideas how to get it to work?