Air 1.5 Broke all Air applications on My Mac.

Question

I updated to 1.5 about two weeks back, and when I did every
single Air application I have stopped working. Some of them
(Remember the Task, Snoopr, Twhirl) say that I am running a version
of Air that isn't supported...and they redirect me to the adobe
site and tell me to update. When I attempt to install again, it
just tells me that the version is already installed.
When this problem first occurred I was running OS X 10.5.5. A
few days ago I updated to OS X 10.5.6 but the problem still exists.
I tried using the adobe uninstaller, and then reinstalled
fresh...but that didn't fix anything either.
Has anyone else had a similar problem? Or does anyone know
where one can download the previous version of AIR?
I'm not an expert at this stuff....so I appreciate any help,
and apologize for any ignorance. Thanks.

Answer 1

I'm adding in my own answer of "what" causes this; however, I still believe it's a bug...
We were using URLMonitor to verify whether or not an asset existed -- Each urlMonitor instantiation and start() method calls generated an additional thread - for certain objects, we were checking for multiple assets (thus the 1000+ threads). This still may be related to garbage collection, but it was definitely the URLMonitor that sparked the issue.