Personally, I use Macromedia Fireworks to create animated GIFs. It has wonderful tools for doing professional quality GIF animations. Macromedia was bought by Adobe recently, so if you buy the newest version of Fireworks then it would be 'Adobe Fireworks'. But you don't need the newest version. I'm sure you can pick up an older version fairly cheap on eBay.

Fireworks might be overkill if all you are interested in is animated GIFs. Fireworks is a very powerful program. Think of it as a scaled down version of Adobe PhotoShop but easier to use. Fireworks is mainly used to mock up web site designs, create web site animations and buttons, and to perform basic photo editing tasks. I find myself using Fireworks far more than PhotoShop to do basic photo editing (like resizing photos) because the Fireworks program opens so much faster than PhotoShop because PhotoShop is a huge program now.

Thanks for the heads up. I really appreciate it. Haven;t played with Macromedia too much, but I think I actually have a copy lying around. 3 kids, too busy LOL