Animated gif from flash

Question

CS4, AS3.Windows XP SP3.
I've created a pretty simple flash animation with some text that fades in and moves around a bit. Nothing fancy. It runs just fine both locally and on my client's site. I need to turn it into an animated gif so that non-flash viewers will see the animation. But I can't seem to get it to come out right. It needs to have a transparent background and it needs to run just once. Like I said, all that runs fine as an SWF.
When I choose the export option in the file menu (export movie as gif), it does export and I can run the gif but the background is definitely not transparent and the thing loops continuously. Yes, I've checked the "transparent" checkbox and also set the repetitions to 1. Neither of those settings do anything.
I also tried "publishing" the gif. That's even worse. The resultant animation doesn't even resemble my SWF. It's a blocky mess when it runs. It does appear to have a transparent background but it loops over and over and again it's a blocky mess (not sure how else to explain that).
The whole thing is just about 10 layers of different lines of text that are tweened in various ways to get the effect I need.
You can see the animation on the right hand side of this page: www.ssrights.com. It's the one that says "FREE! Consultation..."
Hope someone can help.
Thanks,
Keith
PS: The gif is not in place. I currently have it set to just show a static image if someone does not have flash.

Answer 1

Look, I appreciate that you are making an effot to help, but I hope you realize that most pages like that are just there to attract advertisers. They are mostly nonsense. Filled with fluff and little that's actually helpful. Often copied verbatim from the help file of some application. Not the least bit beneficial. There are tons of "how to" sites out there that say next to nothing and still use a lot of words. I run into them countless times each day. It's beyond irritating when you're trying to learn how to do something. This paragraph on that page you referred me to is a perfect example:
Set other options for your animated GIF publication. Optimize the color  of the GIF to remove unused colors so that the image size will be  reduced. Set "Dither Solids" so that the colors will be mixed in the  current existing palette. Other options you have to set up are  Interlace, Smooth, and Remove Gradients. Set all of them very well so  that your animated GIF will be published at its best quality.
Just look at the grammar in the last sentense. It doesn't even make sense and offeres zero useful information. Probably came out of the entirely useless Adobe help system that's fond of defining a term with the term itself.
Back to the GIF settings. I've chosen nearly every combination of settings on the GIF publish tab. Nothing I do works. The only thing that solved the problem (and it's a crummy solution) was to change the text to a broken apart graphic. I'm sure you are more expert in Flash than I am and so you likely know how to solve this. Have you created a simple example with text and successfully published it as a GIF? You don't even need to tween the text. It can be sitting still on it's own layer and it still fouls things up. If so, what settings are you using to make this work right? That inforamtion would be very helpful!
Again, is there anyone out there that has specifically dealt with this problem and can offer a specific, viable solution?
Keith