Thanks to some help on #donationcoder I created some animated GIFs to use as indicators that the computer was doing stuff. A percentage progress bar was not appropriate. So I created some spinning thingies to show the computer wasn't dead. Any way, it turns out AutoIt doesn't do animated GIFs, but it does do AVIs and with Auto3Lib I can do a multi-threaded splash-screen with an AVI. That would do what I need. So, I am looking for your choice for tools to do animated GIF to AVI conversions.