Why aren't the smilies animated anymore?

You know, I could swear I've seen this question posted many times, but the searches I tried brought up a gazillion unrelated threads.

Some details that may or may not be relevant:

My computer had picked up some sort of bug that disabled McAfee VirusScan. I used SpyBot and AdAware to get rid of a lot of junk, but I still couldn't use VirusScan or view inbound activity through Personal Firewall Plus. The instructions from the McAfee help folks didn't work for restoring it. I noticed that I could have eTrust EZ Firewall and Pest Patrol for free through RoadRunner, so I uninstalled all the McAfee components and installed EZ Firewall.

My computer no longer freezes up on me, which is great since this has been going on for over a week, but for some reason, the smilies from DU are no longer animated. Animated gifs from clicksmilies or anywhere else appear okay.

And does anyone know why my search didn't work? Thanks for much.

Other smilies are animated that are posted from other sites but not the DU smilies. I've tried everything I can think of to get them going to no avail. That "bounce" smilie just looks pathetic -- like a squished ball of Playdough! :(

Yeah, that "bounce" smiley does look sad. And the "nuke" emoticon is just a speck!

Oh well, given all the work I had to go through to get the McAfee stuff uninstalled and clear out the bugs, frozen smilies are a small price to pay.

Hopefully this bouncing smiley will display properly for you:

Thanks! :D

Check its settings/options and see if there's something in there about disabling animation. A lot of firewalls do this as a part of privacy or ad blocking, and most have it set to "block" the animation as a default. I'd been using ZoneAlarm for ages, and then upgraded to the Pro version. I did a fresh install and didn't think to check the options. Suddenly my animations weren't working, and it was frustrating trying to find the source of the problem. (I'd installed A LOT of software at the same time.)