I just flipped a switch, yeah. The "animated GIF" problem should be fixed now for IE users.

The actual problem was that IE kept firing the browser's "onload" event for every single frame of the GIF (duh). This event is used in relation to the image viewer we use (HighSlide JS). To make the viewer only show up on too large images that would otherwise destroy the layout, there is code in place to delete a tag outside the image on said "onload" event.

So essentially, in IE the animated GIF would, frame by frame, eat itself out of the page by deleting all surrounding tags layer by layer until it was the only thing left on the page, after which it would freeze the page by finally consuming itself. Think of a snake eating its own tail.

(Found a fix here: http://webbugtrack.blogspot.de/2007/…for-every.html)