Phatty5,
One potential workaround is to take that gif and rebuild it
in flash; create the animation there and save it out as a swf. Then
reimport back into PowerPoint.
Some other workarounds include:
1. if you have a recent version of Photoshop/Image Ready
(CS/CS2), you can save animated gifs to swf file formats simply by
exporting to Flash from within Image Ready. The same pretty much
goes for Illustrator as well.
2. There are a number of tools available online that can
convert gifs to swf format. A quick search in google came up with a
ton of companies/software developers who have made various tools
available.
Rob