A mystery: Animated GIF not displaying correctly.

Question

I've started adding images to a >1 year old game that I kind of abandoned, which formerly used hard-coded graphics. I'm looking to use a 4 frame long animated GIF of what would appear to be a rotating blade-like enemy. (Not actually a blade, but this is irrelevant.)
The GIF which I am using can be viewed here: ftp://72.141.73.226/ftproot/av.gif
I have taken screenshots of the 4 frames I am receiving, and slowed the result down here: ftp://72.141.73.226/ftproot/broken.gif
I'm not quite sure why it's doing that.. Any ideas?
Also, I've got it programmed so that when the enemies are defeated, they emit a small explosion, which is also an animated GIF. It can be found here: ftp://72.141.73.226/ftproot/boom.gif
The images are drawn by the class AI class, which extends JPanel (For the ImageObserver status). The image displayed is determined when a method called changeImg is called.
public void changeImg (String img) {
    this.img = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage(img);
}When the health reaches 0, the 'boom' image (found above) is put onto the object's 'img' variable, which is later called like this:
g.drawImage (img, x-w/2, y, x+w/2, y+h, 0, 0, 20, 20, this);Essentially, it draws the image at certain coordinates depending on the position of the user, and sizes the image depending on the size of the user (variable with difficulty.) and you can see where it is using 'this' as an ImageObserver, because it just so happens to be one. (This is the only way I know to display images.)
There's a small problem, however. When the 'boom' graphic is loaded, it floats around in memory, not being drawn, because it's not being told to, but evidently goign through the animation anyway. This means that all explosions are synchronized, so say I defeat an enemy at frame 0, and then another one at frame 5. The 10 frame explosion is already half-complete, so the second enemy's explosion animation is the latter half of the explosion animation, followed by the inital half. I tried creating the GIF so that it would be set to 'play once', but then after the first enemy exploded, all enemies would display the last frame of the explosion, instead of playing the animation once.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
(This isn't for homework, don't worry. I finished this assignment over a year ago, and just decided to add to it a bunch.)

Answer 1

@OP:
Are you aware of the fact that your FTP server is wide open?