Adobe Imageready is good for making animated gifs. (it comes with photoshop cs) there are a lot of other programs out there purely for gif making. hava a look on http://download.com im sure youll find something usefull on there
Depends how much you want to make GIF animations, if you don't do it often then it is hardly worth buying the software needed. You can do it on line for free. at GIF works. http://www.gifworks.com/image_editor.html
