Folks, further to my previous post (above), I just learned that one can edit the AOI setting without re-cloning the camera at hand... The steps are as follows:
Go to the cloned camera settings and re-introduce the sub stream. Click ok twice and let the cloned camera reboot/restart. Then, re-do the steps "a" through "e" above. It seems that every time one has a sub stream active on a cloned camera configuration, and one deletes (i.e. sets to "none") the sub stream, solely leaving the main stream active, one re-sets/turn-on the AOI option and one has the possibility to therefore re-set the AOI entirely.
Further, once the cloned camera with the desired AOI setting is active on BI, it appears that one can zoom on the cloned camera solely using the mouse wheel (independently of zooming the camera that was the source for cloning). I am doing further testing on this to determine if the zooming of the cloned camera (with specific AOI) can be used for my specific LPR needs...
Hope these findings are helpful to this wondering community!