Dancing Dinosaurs quit dancing

Recently when using Firefox (results similar v2 or v3) gif animations are showing as still images. I have tried changing everything that I could think of. Turned off firewall and anti-spyware made changes suggested on Mozilla, etc. So I thought that I would see what happened in IE, same results except I got the little info bar saying that my security settings would not allow Java script. Ok, so I go and try to lower my security level just to experiment. This brings to question 2 and the part that really irritates me, when I try to lower the setting I get an error message that says level medium-high or whatever is recommended for this zone and to choose a higher setting. What the heck, its my computer if I won't to turn off all protection (not gonna happen) I should be able to. So what is going on? I know that there is a bunch of variables that may be involved, but any help would be appreciated.