while were on the topic of avatars, how do you get the picture to change in images such as in my avatar, or signature?
The answer to both these gentlemens' question is that it must be a .gif (for transparency and/or animated).
Oh,do you know how to make them animated?
I use GIMP, although it has a very haphazard method of converting an image into an animation (each layer becomes one frame).And yes, JPEGs do not allow transparency information or layer data.
Make sure you save it as a PNG file for transparancy.(Image removed from quote.)