Hi John!
Due to copyright issues they've dropped support for gif in GD. Use Imagemagick or netpbm instead.
Aye, I know about that GIF stuff. And GIF is not soo important right now, JPEG & PNG are the wanted php gb functions. GIF isn't so important right now.
http://www.imagemagick.org Get the free pkg from nuonce http://www.nuonce.net/imagemagick.php Your customer will need to rewrite the resizing part but it's easy and the result is better quality anyway IMO. Or netpbm : http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/
Imagemagick is a bit tricky to install on that cobalt, tried it some months ago but some libs missing and so I got stuck. Netpbm is on that machine and used by some other CMS like geeklog. But I don't want to force that customer to rewrite his routines because that php gd lib worked before 4.3.4.
Regards, Frank