On the "Random Thought": The GIF doesn't need to be animated. A GIF is made of multiple frames and each frame contains multiple image blocks. Each image block has its own coördinates and color table. You should be to use multiple image blocks in one frame (GCE block) to get one frame with 24-bit color.

For historical reasons most browsers don't respect a frame delay of 0 (computers used to be slow enough that even a 0 delay was good enough for animation; as they got faster browsers added extra delays to make old animations work correctly), but I think some renderers will correctly treat it as one frame (at least http://slbkbs.org/jsgif/ does! It has other problems with tricky GIFs, though -- the disposal method code is broken, for one).

Of course, you should just use PNG.