Flash Cookies Issue?

Cross-posting from Mac OS X forum, as I completely skipped over this one when deciding where to post Any insight is greatly appreciated!

I've recently discovered the unpleasantries that are Flash Cookies:

http://www.imasuper.com/66/technology/flash-cookies-the-silent-privacy-killer/

I find it extremely obnoxious, bizarre, and disconcerting that you have to go to the Macromedia website to access the Settings Manager for these annoyances:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/index.html

But aside from that, I have another concern. When I go to the Settings Manager and "disable" Flash Cookies by setting the "amount of disk space used to store information on your computer to 0", it seems to do away with most of the flash cookies, but upon further examination, any time I use gmail, it still seems to place a Flash Cookie on there.

Under Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player, there are two folders: #SharedObjects, and macromedia.com. The #SharedObjects folder stays empty, but clicking on the macromedia.com folder leads to:

macromedia.com/support/flash player/sys

In the "sys" folder, #mail.google.com appears whenever I go to gmail (even if I delete it) and has a file called "settings.sol" in it. There is also a "settings.sol" in the sys folder.

To me, it seems EXTREMELY sketchy that macromedia is burying something like this deep in folders called "support" and such.

But should I be concerned that google mail flash cookies reappear (and are the ONLY ones, thus far to reappear) despite having "disabled" flash cookies? Is my privacy/security being compromised? Why is gmail the ONLY site that continues to place flash cookies on my computer despite me disabling it?

Or is it actually a flash cookie, since it's not in the #SharedObjects folder, like all of my year old flash cookies were when I first stumbled upon them?

Can anyone shed any light on this situation?? Help!