Sudden fading of desktop image

Well, this may seem like a trivial "problem" and it well may be but since I just bought this G5 and a costly 30" Apple display, I look at any "little" thing as possibly a sign of Major Trouble in my computer and/or display.
So, yesterday I was on the phone for hours with Apple about another issue (posted here if you have time to kill) and they had me do a million things to try to resolve it, nothing working. In the middle of one such operation I noticed that my desktop image suddenly went pale. I even mentioned it to the Apple woman but then I said maybe I've just been looking at it for too long.
After we hung up this pallid desktop pattern kept bothering me and I wanted to know for sure if it was my imagination or if something had "happened." I went into display settings and sure enough the calibration setting was on something weird - maybe it got there somehow during all the diagnostics Apple had me do. So I put it back to the correct setting but nothing changed as far as the desktop pattern quality.
The image is a gif that I downloaded from a cool website that has free desktop patterns and pictures. It maybe 2" x 2" and is tiled on the desktop. I went to the site, found the image, and sure enough, it's richer in tint, everything I had remembered. So I am thinking this cannot exactly be a display problem per se because I am looking at the same image on the website (perfect) and on my desktop (pale and washed out). So I think maybe it has something to do with the actual .gif - that something happened to it within the desktop image settings.
I remove it as a desktop image and from my files and trash it. I download it again from the site. When I look at it in Preview the colors are perfect. I even rename it. I put it in the desktop picture box and it fills the screen again as a tiled pattern, but as the same PALE washed out version. I try this several times all with the same result.
Then I remembered that I had sent this image to a friend so I found the email and took the attachment off and placed the image back in the desktop window. This time it worked. The image was as it should be, with all its rich tones. As a safeguard I emailed the .gif to myself at a yahoo account.
I could go back to the desktop pattern site and get the image again just to see if it would work properly from the start but I am afraid something will go wrong again and I have "resolved" the problem via the email attached .gif. Or maybe there is a real problem and I literally have covered it up by using the saved .gif.
Can anyone explain this to me? What misery could this indicate? Or can an image somehow suddenly get corrupted? What was really weird was that I kept downloading it from the site and it looked perfect UNTIL I put it in as a desktop image.
It's little things like this that drives some people to madness!
Thank you for reading.
G5 Quad Core Tower Mac OS X (10.4.8)

thanks kwamster, now where was i? well, i think onyX actually did fix the off-times. now they reflect reality. we will see how that holds up.
in the meanwhile i essentially was forced at gunpoint to do an archive/install, and while i feared it my system seems to be unscathed. however, the desktop image thing remains unresolved. i am getting around it for the moment with a version of the image i found that seems only a few shades off. i can live with it for now. it's not so much IT as what IT may be an indication of, hence the archive/install which didn't cure it.
now apple is talking of my doing an erase/install which you can believe i am not in the mood to do but then a tier 2 person suggested that maybe the problem was in that it was a .gif format, not a .jpg. he suggests i fool around with the image in photoshop, get it colorwize where i want it and then save it as a .jpg and put it in the desktop preference window. i think it's a brilliant idea but if there is an underlying Major Problem it is only a kind of Band-Aid solution. he said the next thing i could do before an erase/install would be a hardware diagnostic, run off the apple install disk.
the three icons that are now question marks in the dock oddly have disappeared from the g3 folder on my g5. it's unlike me to have deleted them and anything else i've tried to move as an experiment from there out of the folder and onto the dock still keeps a copy on the desktop. the one dragged to the dock goes pouf if you remove it. no biggie. i can rewrite the info and make new OSX clippings. i asked the apple woman today if perhaps the mistake was putting something in the dock that was something other than an application and she said that you can put anything there, so...
oh, part of what i did today was indeed create a new user and make a test of the image and had the same problem. that is what led to the archive/install because they said it was a system issue not a user issue, but again, it seems not to have changed anything.
also verified and or repaired the permissions several times.
oh well. i'm riding quite the learning curve here.
thank you for your kind words of encouragement, however. they ease the pain.

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