Try un-installing ZoneAlarm. I found this forum looking for help on how to fix the very same problem you have, and I noticed that you said you had Zone Alarm as well. It was a striking commonality, so I figured that I should try uninstalling and see if I got any success. It worked like a charm for me, I can see all the animated gifs I want now.

Hope I helped.

It would appear that you have several problems.

1. Incredimail is spyware and can bog down your system and seriously interfere with your browser.
2. Some other spyware, adware, or Trojan is likely interfering with your ActiveX controls. Since all IE browser add-ons use ActiveX, problems ensue.

To start with, you should go to the HijackThis Quick Start Page and carefully follow the instructions.

You should also use Spybot Search & Destroy and/or Ad-Aware spyware/adware tools, as well. You can find links to both on my Malware Information page, along with more detailed information. I know it's a lot of information, but as long as you continue to use Internet Explorer and Outlook or Incredimail instead of Mozilla you are forced to become an expert on malware of every type.

It certainly seems to be ZoneAlarm that causes the problem. I found that a gif downloaded with ZoneAlarm enabled does not animate. The same file downloaded with ZoneAlarm disabled is the same size and works fine. It continues to work with ZoneAlarm re-enabled !
Strange...

Had the very same problem and hadn't thought to check zone alarm till now. Managed to get it sorted by going into zone alarm - Privacy - Ad Blocking - Custom - and unchecking the 'animation' box. Thanks folks.

I have somewhat the same problem in that I cant see the graphics that are supposed to be clickable icons, all I get is a box with a red x. All worked fine til I took out a small hard drive and put in a big one from an old computer I had, loaded windows xp pro and ie6. This was a week ago. It's the same xp pro disk, nothing new there, no changes were made by me to anything, it's all default settings. I have tried disabling ZoneAlarm, it made no difference. I have updated the java virtual machine, and that let me see some neat java stuff but didnt fix the icon situation. I've done pretty well all the stuff the original poster here has talked about, I've followed every idea suggested to me, yet I cant see a lot of clickable icons on websites that used to work just fine! Does anyone have some ideas for me? I dont have AOL or Incredimail.

Thanks
Funkynassau

Thank you so much! I was losing my mind! Everything worked fine on my laptop until the HD fried, and I scavanged about 10 CD's worth of data that I wanted to save in about 22 hours of work. I went back to my Win Millenium desktop and immediately noticed animations were not working. After 2 months Toshiba finally sent a replacement drive, and after reinstalling everything the way I remembered it on the laptop, (upgrading to SP2), I still had no animations. This was driving me nuts and I'm glad the mention of this thread was on Google. I found absolutely no support or mention of this problem anywhere else.

I have a newer version of Zone Alarm, but shut it down, and bam! animations worked and continued to work when I turned it back on. I reset the slider that blocks he animations from high to off, and all is well. Can see all pictures and animations again.

ATF