Using the animation tools I can have a gif follow the mouse inter but is there a way to replace the mouse pointer with the gif so the pointer does not appear?

thanks -

It may be possible.

It is possible to set up a "custom cursor" with IE6 -- details here. The cursor has to be .ani or a .cur file, and you can create one with an icon editor.

If you made such a cursor completely blank, your gif image would then effectively become the cursor.

The trick with anything like this is getting it to work on all the main browsers -- this one is IE6 only. You might find something better by googling on javascript "custom cursor".

firefox doesn't support then, which is good beacuse they are irritating, unless made well.
But yes IE does support them, but wether the new IE will i don't know :/